"This operation requires an interactive window station" error when installing device drivers

Question

When updating the drivers for the device "Synaptics SMBus TouchPad" in device manager, I keep on getting the error that this update requires an "interactive windows station." I am using the windows 10 insider preview build 10162.

Solution 1

Not Sure if you are still having this issue. But if anybody else have this issue, Its most of the time a permission issue to :

• "C:\Windows\System32\drivers"
• "C:\Windows\System32\DriverStore"

Take ownership of those folder and grant full control to everyone.

Check if this works :)

Solution 2

Well, "most of the time" doesn't seem to fit completely. So here's more precise list of reasons that can cause this message to appear:

• Incorrect permissions on C:\Windows\system32\drivers
• Incorrect permissions on C:\Windows\system32\DriverStore
• Incorrect permissions on C:\Windows\system32\DRVSTORE

But beyond that, there's more. Even if the permissions on these 3 directories are correct, Windows then tries to hardlink the dll from the DriverStore\FileStore directly into the C:\Windows\system32 directory, and that's where the issue arises. It can be diagnosed by examining the - C:\Windows\INF\setupapi.dev.log : basically the lines with exclamation signs mean errors. You should also check the part when the line "Drp can't overwrite protected file." appears: that's where real issue lies. For me the solution was to manually copy these problematic files: luckily, C:\Windows\INF\setupapi.dev.log contains full source and target file information. Right after that the installation succeeded.

Leaving this here mostly to accomodate all of the fragmented over the Internel information in one place. Took me four days to repair my Windows 10 installation.

Other than this, I've also struggled with the unsigned windows drivers and various other issues, but this seems to be the subject of another issue.

Comments

[Ramhound]

Go to the Synaptics website and try installing the driver yourself, make sure, you have Administrator permissions and download a compatible driver. Of course based on my other research it might also require you to reinstall Windows 10

[DavidPostill]

Welcome to Super User! This is really a comment and not an answer to the original question. To critique or request clarification from an author, leave a comment below their post - you can always comment on your own posts, and once you have sufficient reputation you will be able to comment on any post.

[Soren Stoutner]

This has indeed been the answer on all the systems where I have encountered this error. However, I would not recommend granting full control to the Everyone group for security reasons. Rather, granting full control to the Administrators group works just fine.