Windows 10 > automatically re-enabled disabled hardware

snowdog

snowdog

snowdog

Soldato
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We've come across a problem where the ID's of certain devices connect to our portal changed.

We base these ID's by using an algorithm on the MAC-Address on our devices and a GUID is created based on the MAC-Addresses. (why mac addresses you ask, because some boards we use do not have a proper HW ID we can base it off).

Suddenly different/new id's started popping up out of nowhere.

I did not see any updates in update history.
However, on 2-2-2017 new drivers appeared in C:\Windows\system32\driverstore,these appear to be intel BT drivers.

We have the BT adapter disabled by (in our image) default as we don't use it.
Now, suddenly, in device manager, it's enabled.

What process does this and how can we prevent windows from re-enabling disabled hardware?

Is there a way of denying access to the device in device manager to prevent this from happening again? Windows 10 Enterprise LTSB...
 
That is just temporarily though, we don't want any drivers to update unless we update them manually.

Or disable driver updating for disabled devices.
 
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Good luck with that. There is a minitool somewhere that can do it temporarily but any future Windows update can break it again.

AFAIK the only way to stop it is to take fairly drastic action which can make it a pain to apply updates you do want. They really need to fire whoever at MS is being so stubborn over this automatic driver/update rubbish.

EDIT: Complain enough to MS and they will probably eventually add in yet another clunky special case fix for it - rather than address the root cause of the issue.
 
Rroff said:
Good luck with that. There is a minitool somewhere that can do it temporarily but any future Windows update can break it again.
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Don't receive feature updates as we use the LTSB version. Only sec updates.

Can you send me a link to that tool?

AFAIK the only way to stop it is to take fairly drastic action which can make it a pain to apply updates you do want. They really need to fire whoever at MS is being so stubborn over this automatic driver/update rubbish.

EDIT: Complain enough to MS and they will probably eventually add in yet another clunky special case fix for it - rather than address the root cause of the issue.
Click to expand...
We've considered disabling automatic updates altogether, as they caused issues, and running a scheduled application that does the updates on specified time. In the end we kept automatic updates but disabled the notification applications (musnotify.exe and musnotifysomething.exe) by restricting access from all users to it after taking ownership.

The funny thing is Windows seems to ignore it's own group policies, as we have an update + reboot in the group policy editor to do it every monday at 6:00 am.

Anyhow, getting offtopic, besides disabling windows update, does anyone know of a different way? That tool you mentioned, what is it called/where can it be found :) ?
 
That is all nice and all, but we have 150+ devices running an older build that isn't receiving feature updates :). Older than 15002...

Anyone know the minitool Rroff is talking about?
 
I'm not entirely sure that is possible, as in how do I tell windows 10 ent ltsb to not use windows update?

What about taking ownership of C:\Windows\System32\DriverStore\FileRepository and denying write access? Anyone know if this can cause issues or errors, or is the only way to find out to try it out and test it?

I did that with MusNotificationUx.exe and MusNotification.exe, completely denied access (even read) to it, to prevent the ''on top'' update prompts.
 
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