How do you manually remove a driver which was left behind by a program?

Hello,

what is the proper way to remove a driver from Windows 11, which was not properly removed/unregistered by a program or uninstaller routine? I see with Autoruns that there are a few drivers which were not removed even the program they came from are uninstalled. You can deselect them with Autoruns is that enough? I think that somehow disables them, is that true, but theyre still left behind.

If a device in device manager is associated with the driver, right click on the device, select uninstall device, check the box to remove the driver for the device.

You can also show nonpresent devices and delete them.
Once you enter the command to show non present devices, open Device Manager.
Click View tab and select Show hidden devices. Expand the branches in the device tree & look for the faded icons. These indicate unused device drivers.
Right-click on one and select Uninstall.


As a last resort, Also Driver Store Explorer should do it. Be very careful using it.

glasskuter said:

If a device in device manager is associated with the driver, right click on the device, select uninstall device, check the box to remove the driver for the device.

Click to expand...

I didnt ask about physical devices / hardware drivers but software drivers. Software drivers applications use wont show under device manager.

What information do you have on the software and driver names?

What's happening that you found incomplete removal or performance problems?

The drivers are kernel IO drivers by Asrock, which were installed together with the RGB Tool by Asrock ASRock Polychrome RGB. After removing the buggy RGB Software I noticed the drivers were left behind and not removed by the uninstall routine. I found out that Asrock kernel IO drivers had security exploits in the past and also gave bluescreens and other issues so I want them removed.



There is also this driver called inpoutx64 which seems to be hooked into the system by running Zentimings, even I never installed it but ran it as portable, it hooked and installed a permanent driver into the system which I also found reports of bluescreens about.

I disabled them with Autoruns so far, not sure if that is the right thing to do though, I want them gone. Does deselecting them in Autoruns even disable them?

Since that driver is in a temp folder I would think you could just delete it.
You can also reinstall HWInfo, then uninstall it with Revo Installer Free, making sure to check any leftover remnants the uninstaller finds and delete them.
Revo has a portable version that works just fine. Download Revo Uninstaller Freeware - Free and Full Download

glasskuter said:

Since that driver is in a temp folder I would think you could just delete it.

Click to expand...

It is not. You didnt look at the picture properly.

maffle said:

Does deselecting them in Autoruns even disable them?

Click to expand...

You can right click a driver in Autoruns, and delete it.
You might want to make a backup, before you start deleting drivers.



More info...


I don't have any 3rd party keyboard or mouse drivers.
I have inpoutx64.sys also.

I do have an old joystick I use.
A while back I played around with a program called JoyToKey...which had to do with remapping my joystick keys.
Maybe that's where I got it.

I'll make a fresh backup tomorrow, and remove inpoutx64.sys ...and see what happens.
I'll post the results in here, tomorrow afternoon.



Highresolution Enterprises does have a forum...

1) Please run the V2 log collector > post a share link into this thread using one drive, drop box, or google drive



2) Read this tutorial on Windows Driver Verifier:



3) Make a new restore point:

@maffle

I removed the driver and nothing seems to be affected.

When I first tried to just delete the driver... I got a "this driver is in use by a program".
So... I disabled it in Autoruns, then rebooted. THEN I could delete the driver.

Currently, I have left the driver installed. Maybe someone who also has this driver, could find which program is using it.

It wasn't... my joystick, EVGA Precision, AIDA64 Extreme, Bitdefender, etc.
With the driver removed... Device Manager showed no warnings.

This is what AIDA64 says about it...

You can simply use the service controller commands.


You will only want to disable the service if you aren't able to stop it. You will need to reboot the machine for the start type changes to take effect. After the service has been successfully deleted, then you should be able to safely delete the associated .inf and .sys files manually.

If this is a driver that creates a service, see my post here: Start, Stop, and Disable Services in Windows 10

Inpoutx64 is apparently an open source kernal driver installed by such software as OpenRGB to allow access to serial, parallel and other I/O ports.
There are various guides online as to how to completely remove OpenRGB, so it seems like one of those installations that might leave orphans behind such as this driver.
Removing the software that uses it first then using Autoruns or similar to disable it, reboot then delete it should work.
Depending on which software you have installed this might break other installations that expect to find this driver on the system.