Windows – Removing (Presumably) Extraneous Network Adapters from Device Manager (eg WAN Miniport)

Note: The guidance I provide here, if you intend to follow any of it you do it at your own risk and I take no responsibility for your actions. The first thing I needed to do was...unlike how most articles I found online say that I need to ONLY remove the WAN Miniport drivers under Device Manager's Network Adapters, I actually had to remove ALL Network Adapters under there. Maybe its overkill, I dunno, its the only thing that worked for me.

How to Achieve Removal of All Network Adapters in Windows 8.1

• You need to update each one individually to an arbitrary kernel driver. I used some random Bluetooth driver at the top of the Microsoft drivers list.
• You need to right click the newly updated driver and Uninstall it.

Sometimes, you may find you have issues uninstalling these drivers. One issue I had was blue-screens that would happen every time I tried to uninstall a particular one of them. However, I found these tools a huge help (again, use them at your own risk). Once I followed the guide and ran WAN Miniport Repair Tool Version 2 and then ran the WAN Miniport Installer, no more bluescreens, just that it installs more devices under Network Adapters, so now you need to go through a few reboots and uninstall these drivers a few times, over and over again. Its painful and time consuming, but worth it.

If you hit the Windows key and type services.msc, you will find, in Windows 8.1, a neat little service called Remote Access Connection Manager. This will enable some of the Miniport adapters for you. Otherwise, if they are not enabled and are hidden in Device Manager, you will not be able to update them as they will not take on another arbitrary kernel driver. Start and Stop this service at will in order to enable these drivers for updates.

Make sure to remove all drivers. Once you are done removing them all, start the Remote Access Connection Manager service again and see if you have any more faulty drivers. This time, just look for the yellow warning icons and update only the ones with these icons. Repeat this process (keep restarting the Remote Access Connection Manager until all of them no longer have the icons).

This service should only be starting the Miniport drivers, so all you should have now is the Miniport drivers and the RAS Async Adapter. I also updated and uninstalled the RAS Async Adapter at some point. I am not sure if that also required me to start a different service or not anymore (the other service was Remote Access Auto Connection Manager).

At this point, with only Miniport adapters showing, I rebooted, one last god damn time, and it worked. I was so happy I could cry (but didn't - I would never).

I had to, by the way, start hard rebooting to make things less time consuming by holding the power button, and pressing CTRL+ALT+DELETE when the "Please wait" screen in Windows came up to bypass it from going into that annoying startup options window.

First, you need to stop windows from automatically downloading drivers.

1. [win-key] + pause/break
2. Advanced system settings
3. Hardware tab
4. Device Installation Settings
5. No

Next, uninstall the device using the device manager

IF you get the option to also "Delete the driver software for this device" do it!
If this option works, the next step(s) should be unfruitful as you won't find any entries.

Now, just to be sure, make sure there are no more OEM drivers for this device on the system.

1. get a list of ALL OEM driver packages and dump it to a file
2. Open a command prompt as an Admin.
3. run the command -- pnputil -e >>%TEMP%\oemlist.txt
4. run the command -- notepad %TEMP%\oemlist.txt

Search the text file for "Network adapters". Look for one or more blocks that looks like this.. there can be more than one driver package for a single device. What you need is the oemXXX.inf name to remove the driver package.

Published name :            oem16.inf
Driver package provider :   Realtek
Class :                     Network adapters
Driver date and version :   01/19/2018 10.25.119.2018
Signer name :               Microsoft Windows Hardware Compatibility Publisher

5. run the command -- pnputil.exe -d oemXXX.inf that you read from the text file.
6. reboot (just in case and to prove that it worked).
7. (optional) find the device in the device manager with the yellow triangle and disable it.

If you ever want the driver back, either enable the auto windows download or re-install the OEM driver package.

Good Luck!