Installed Vista driver by mistake

[barbary]

I have made a mistake and installed the Vista driver for a USB WiFi on an XP machine.

Now when ever I try to install the correct driver it always trys to install the vista driver. Even if I say "I Have A Disk" when it starts it looks for the vista driver on the flashstick that I originaly installed it from.

Is there a way of knocking a driver reference out of XP all together.

Realy tearing my hair out over this one.

 

[Bateluer]

Put the Vista driver and XP driver in separate folders and point XP to the XP folder?

 

[barbary]

The Vista driva isn't even on the computer. XP keeps trying to install it no matter what because it was on there before.

 

[Cutthroat]

XP has a driver backup folder in the System32 folder, I can't remember the name of the folder but it should be obvious. Did XP put a copy of the driver in there?

 

[bsobel]

Go to device manager and uninstall the device, when the dialog come up, select 'delete driver'.

 

[Evander]

Do what bsobel said, if you need to do more, if it still isn't gone:
- boot into safe mode (restart pc, hold down f8 key before windows starts to boot and you'll see a menu to select safe mode), go into device manager again and if that driver is still there, delete it again- that should kill it for good.

- Another option is to simply replace the vista driver files manually with the xp driver files. How do you know where these drivers are located? There is a free program called double driver that backs up all drivers installed on your windows pc. For instance, after running the setup for a driver install of a soundcard, windows installed these files:
a3d.dll
oem12.inf
sensupgd.sys
smwdm.sys
I got this information from the double driver program. So in your case you'd use double driver to find the troublesome vista files, and replace them with the xp versions (maybe you would have to temporarily install those xp drivers onto another machine and grab them from there. and if simply replacing the files doesn't work, you might have to right click the .inf file and select 'install')

Also, you did uninstall the vista drivers from add/remove programs in control panel right? And one further option is to try system restore the registry to a point before you installed those drivers.

 

[barbary]

I'll try these. I have uninstalled the driver but it's like XP is holding a reference to it somewhere and knows it exists even if it doesn have the files.

When ever I try to install the XP drivers it asks for files from the Vista install.