Ghosted USB Profiles for Joystick, Throttle and Rudder Peddles

[bustr]

Skuzzy,

How much of a problem in the Win OS family are the ghosted multiple USB device profiles for a single game device created by the OS? Some players add and remove their controller many times into several different ports.

There is a registry tweek for Win7 device manager and some freeware ghosted device enumerators that will show this. I've just removed about 3dozen for my old Saitek, CH , old TR3, and old Monitor hardware. Other game and device blogs show players having similar loss of calibration issues as we do. With removal of ghost device profiles as one of the house keeping chores to fix the issue for "some players".

[Bizman]

I've been using a batch file to find the ghosted devices, or non-present devices as Microsoft calls them. Simply copy and paste the lines below in Notepad and save the result as anyname.bat - just remember to change the "save as type" to "all files". Right click the file and run it as administrator. Your Device Manager should open and when it does, choose "Show hidden devices" under the "View" drop down menu. Everything greyed out is not powered or connected and they should be safe to uninstall.

Should you remove something existent by accident it should reinstall itself at next boot. Keep in mind, though, that everything that can fail will do so at some point. Should this happen, all you need to do is to reinstall a driver. My advice is to remove only things that you know should be safe to uninstall like ghost entries of your gaming devices or a plethora of memory sticks. Notice that they'll be in several and not so obvious locations, like "Human Interface Devices" or "Disk Drives" as well as "Universal Serial Bus Controllers". Not to mention remains of Antivirus programs you have long uninstalled! You'll find those under "Non Plug and Play Drivers". I'd leave "Network Adapters" and "Sound, video and game controllers" untouched unless you really can identify a device that you have removed from your computer.

After all these instructions and warnings, here's the batch lines:

@echo off
set DEVMGR_SHOW_NONPRESENT_DEVICE S=1
start devmgmt.msc

[bustr]

I use "Device Remover" which is freeware. It has a better graphical tree along with a more in depth look at each object than Device Manager. I added the key to the registry and didn't like the way MS displays info in device manager. My own squad mates get cross eyed when I talk about my batch files to stop services before starting the game.

USB where games are concerned, is a mixed blessing and horrible curse trying to find the real source of bus resets and\or out of calibration issues. Looks like PnP still needs a prayer regardless of assurances from the priesthood at MS.

Still I'm curious if Skuzzy thinks the ghost profiles have any bearing.

[Skuzzy]

The random bus resets are more of a problem than anything else.  That is what causes the need to recalibrate so often.  Brown outs of the USB bus due to power draw is a major problem in Windows.

We finally had to stop looking at the bus change messages from Windows due to the thousands it send when the bus gets into a brownout condition.

I would never hook a HOTAS setup to a computer USB bus, directly.  I always use a dedicated externally powered USB hub for any HOTAS setup.  It will solves 99% of the USB bus related problems.

[bustr]

Are the random bus resets due to the power draw of the connected device or, just random gifts from the machine or OS?

Oops, how often can USB issues be tied to INFCACHE.1 ?

[Skuzzy]

The brownouts are due to power draw.  There has never been a USB controller made, which would actually supply the maximum current allowed by the specification.