DDU + Nvidia Control Panel Error

[Dicehunter]

Apologies for the noobish question but I did a fresh install of Windows 11 one week ago, Windows fully updated, All drivers updated etc... all working beautifully.

I used DDU to remove the Nvidia driver I was using and install the new one so I'd have a nice clean slate, It installed, Went ok, Later on I rebooted, Went to open the Nvidia control panel and it said the following - "Windows cannot access the specified device, path, or file" so I looked around and found people tried uninstalling the Nvidia control panel itself and reinstalling it from the MS Store, Same thing happened, No go.

I tried uninstalling the driver and installing the previous one, Same issue, I simply couldn't open the control panel anymore and this only happened once I used DDU.

Any idea what within DDU could cause this ? DDU seemed to work without interruption, No crashing or anything.

[Wagnard]

Apologies for the noobish question but I did a fresh install of Windows 11 one week ago, Windows fully updated, All drivers updated etc... all working beautifully.

I used DDU to remove the Nvidia driver I was using and install the new one so I'd have a nice clean slate, It installed, Went ok, Later on I rebooted, Went to open the Nvidia control panel and it said the following - "Windows cannot access the specified device, path, or file" so I looked around and found people tried uninstalling the Nvidia control panel itself and reinstalling it from the MS Store, Same thing happened, No go.

I tried uninstalling the driver and installing the previous one, Same issue, I simply couldn't open the control panel anymore and this only happened once I used DDU.

Any idea what within DDU could cause this ? DDU seemed to work without interruption, No crashing or anything.

Hi, This is not something I ever saw on my Win 11 test systems.
Can you
1- Email me the content of the DDU logs folder
2- Have you changed some path ? ex: App store default install location ? or anything else?
3- Did you ever change files or folder permission within C:\Program Files or C:\Program Files\WindowsApps\ ?

[Dicehunter]

Apologies for the late reply... can't get the log as DDU was on my main drive that I had to format to get things working again.
All program and driver install paths were default and no permissions were changed.
If it happens again I'll forward you the log.

[Wagnard]

There's is a much better way of removing old drivers that doesn't rely on some lone group of programmers making rules for every possible hardware configuration.

First of all, hi.
and what would be theses much better way?
Did you encountered some problems with my softwares?
Also, we don't make rules for each possible configurations, check your sources.

[jibeta281]

Nvidia strongly recommends against using Device Manager for uninstallation and installation of drivers. They've been saying this for a fair while now in every driver Release Notes PDF file.