Appearance of annoying wizard

I would be most grateful for any advice on how to deal with the following
problem, which is occurring on my daughter's laptop, running Windows XP Home
edition.
Every time the computer is started, a "Welcome to the Found New Hardware
Wizard" appears, even though no new hardware has been installed. When trying
to proceed, the wizard says that it is trying to install software for "Video
Controller (VGA compatible)".
When it is asked to install this software it commences "searching" but never
comes to any conclusion, and eventually the process has to be cancelled, only
for the wizard to reappear the next time that the computer is started up!
Any comments or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Regards,

Peter wrote:
I would be most grateful for any advice on how to deal with the following
problem, which is occurring on my daughter's laptop, running Windows XP Home
edition.
Every time the computer is started, a "Welcome to the Found New Hardware
Wizard" appears, even though no new hardware has been installed. When trying
to proceed, the wizard says that it is trying to install software for "Video
Controller (VGA compatible)".
When it is asked to install this software it commences "searching" but never
comes to any conclusion, and eventually the process has to be cancelled, only
for the wizard to reappear the next time that the computer is started up!
Any comments or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Regards,


The thing is, a video device can use two different drivers.
You can see some mention of this, here.

"How to force Windows to use a standard VGA compatible driver"
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/268852

When you first install Windows, there may be no video driver.
All video cards seem to support some kind of default mode
of operation. Windows has a built-in driver to access that.
That ensures, you're not "blind" while installing Windows
from the installer CD.

In your case, what the message suggests to me, is for some reason
the real driver is no longer functioning properly. So no "regular"
graphics are detected, and the system is reverting to VGA compatible.

You could try using Device Manager, and enable "Show Hidden Devices",
and see if the regular video device is present and is having a problem.

So the thing you're seeing, is a side effect of a problem elsewhere,
with the real video driver.

You might try looking in setupapi.log, for messages from the video
driver installation. I opened the file in Notepad, and since I know
my video card is a 9800, I searched for 9800 to find the driver
installation lines. The video card supports dual monitors, and
they show two entries in Device Manager to support that. So the
drivers effectively are installed twice, to support each logical
display channel. I think these two hardware IDs, correspond to the
two logical halves of my video card. (There is too much stuff, for
me to copy all of that section of setupapi.log.)

pci\ven_1002&dev_4e48&subsys_00021002
pci\ven_1002&dev_4e68&subsys_00031002

Reinstalling the video driver would be an easy suggestion, except
if something is screwed up in the registry, that won't fix it. I
consider that to be a problem with the design of Windows, that
there isn't an option to "flush" garbage from the registry during
a reinstallation of some software. Having to go in by hand, and
remove an errant entry is silly.

For example, to reset video resolution to a reasonable value,
that could be properly displayed, this person discovered a couple
registry entries to delete. You shouldn't have to know this stuff,
to restore proper operation of your computer. The registry seems
to have a number of entries, perhaps more than you might expect
for the number of displays you've got. Some of the entries
may actually be for usage with the "VGA compatible" fallback.

http://groups.google.ca/group/comp.s...2?dmode=source

*******

You can see in this thread, someone using a program called
"mControl" to list all the relevant display entries in the
system.

http://forums.entechtaiwan.com/index.php?topic=6788.0

This is a direct link to download mControl, so you can
examine the log. Apparently this is shareware, although the
terms were not discussed on the announcement page. There
is a 21 day evaluation period.

http://www.entechtaiwan.com/files/mc_setup.exe

This is the first part of the log for my computer. Right click
the icon in the tray, and select "Save Diagnostic Report" to
create a log. Here, you can see the two logical channels of the
video card, plus the one physical monitor. There are a couple
virtual entries, one for NetMeeting and the other one I haven't a
clue. Perhaps you could run that tool, and see if anything
looks out of the ordinary.

01:14:22.765...mControl Report, generated 8/22/2009 (5.1.2600)
01:14:22.765...Copyright (c) 1995-2009, EnTech Taiwan.
01:14:22.765...Version = 1.0.0.680
01:14:22.765...OS = 5.1.2600.2.Service Pack 3
01:14:22.765...Mechanism = 1
01:14:22.765...ID = 1515
01:14:22.765...Dump: complete Windows device enumeration
01:14:22.765...1.DeviceName = \\.\DISPLAY1
01:14:22.765.....DeviceFlags = 08000005
01:14:22.765.....DeviceString = RADEON 9800 PRO (Microsoft Corporation)
01:14:22.765.....DeviceID = PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_4E48&SUBSYS_00021002&REV_00
01:14:22.765.....DeviceKey = \Registry\Machine\System\CurrentControlSet\Control \Video\{F347FAAB-BDB8-4E8A-9468-6DF07CD9ED5F}\0000
01:14:22.765.....a.MonitorName = \\.\DISPLAY1\Monitor0
01:14:22.765.......MonitorFlags = 00000003
01:14:22.765.......MonitorString = NEC LCD1765
01:14:22.765.......MonitorID = Monitor\NEC6621\{4D36E96E-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}\0000
01:14:22.765.......MonitorKey = \Registry\Machine\System\CurrentControlSet\Control \Class\{4D36E96E-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}\0000
01:14:22.765.......Raw EDID = 00FFFFFFFFFFFF0038A32166010101011F0D010308221B78EA 2EE5A4574A9C25115054BFEF80714F81800101010101010101 01010101302A009851002A4030701300520E1100001E000000 FD00384B1F510E000A202020202020000000FC004E4543204C 4344313736350A20000000FF00333731313536373951410A20 200005
01:14:22.765...2.DeviceName = \\.\DISPLAY2
01:14:22.765.....DeviceFlags = 00000000
01:14:22.765.....DeviceString = RADEON 9800 PRO SEC (Microsoft Corporation)
01:14:22.765.....DeviceID = PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_4E68&SUBSYS_00031002&REV_00
01:14:22.765.....DeviceKey = \Registry\Machine\System\CurrentControlSet\Control \Video\{5AA8BA08-D99E-4A0A-A7BE-8999AE2FA548}\0000
01:14:22.765...3.DeviceName = \\.\DISPLAYV1
01:14:22.765.....DeviceFlags = 00000008
01:14:22.765.....DeviceString = NetMeeting driver
01:14:22.765.....DeviceID =
01:14:22.765.....DeviceKey = \Registry\Machine\System\CurrentControlSet\Control \Video\{8B6D7859-A639-4A15-8790-7161976D057A}\0000
01:14:22.765...4.DeviceName = \\.\DISPLAYV2
01:14:22.765.....DeviceFlags = 00000008
01:14:22.765.....DeviceString = RDPDD Chained DD
01:14:22.765.....DeviceID =
01:14:22.765.....DeviceKey = \Registry\Machine\System\CurrentControlSet\Control \Video\{DEB039CC-B704-4F53-B43E-9DD4432FA2E9}\0000
01:14:22.765...Total number of monitors enumerated = 1

*******

So my guess is, there is something wrong with the regular video
driver, and the new hardware wizard is a side effect of that.

Paul