How do I clean up drivers that an uninstaller didn't properly remove?

Question

A while back I installed a USB 3G modem (a Three Mobile Huawei D160G and Mobile Partner software) on my Windows 2008 64 bit development box. I immediately encountered a problem where upon starting a Windows 2003 Standard Edition VM in Virtual Server 2005R2 the host OS would crash with a Blue Screen of Death periodically.

I've since bought a Billion 3G router to plug the USB 3G modem into and uninstalled the Mobile Partner software that came with the 3G stick.

The blue screen problems continued however and I noticed that the uninstaller hadn't removed the network adapter it created when the 3G software was installed. I deleted this but suspect that there's still something left over that's causing Virtual Server 2005R2 to BSOD.

I had a peek in the registry and can see four entries:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\hwcdcmdm0 HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\hwdatacard HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\hwusbapp HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\hwusbser

The hwdatacard registry entry has a value named ImagePath which points to system32\DRIVERS\ewusbmdm.sys. This file physically doesn't exist (presumably deleted at uninstall time) and it's definately related to the Huawei adapter (it has a DisplayName value of Huawei DataCard USB Modem and USB serial so I'm guessing all of the hw* entries above are related to this device.

I've run DriverView and USBDeview and can't see anything obvious.

Can I just delete the four registry keys listed above? Sadly it's been

Solution 1

The problem it seems isn't left over drivers from the 3G USB dongle, but a hardware fault on the machine. I flattened the machine and installed Windows 7 Ultimate and the problem remains where Virtual PC 7 does exactly the same thing.

Solution 2

You can use a free program called Crap Cleaner, really. You can find it here.

It is great at cleaning your computer and has a really good registry cleaner also.

Solution 3

Try this:

1. Reconnect the USB modem.
2. Re-install the drivers and software.
3. Uninstall the drivers from Device Manager. Doing so should cleanly take the network connection along with it.
4. Disconnect the USB modem.
5. Follow the uninstall program to remove the Mobile Partner software again.

Comments

[Ben Collier]

Sadly the modem is currently not in my possession at the moment. I repaved the machine with Win7 which was due anyway. Thanks anyway.

[Ben Collier]

Thanks for the link. I decided to repave the machine with Win7 so all the crap gone anyway :)

[itprofessionalsgroup]

Well that is a very appropriate decision. I would love to make the switch to Win7 but haven't done so yet. Have fun with the new OS.