Windows 10/11: Old drivers are installed again (Oct. 2023)

[German]Once again, I'm bringing up a topic that has been brought to my attention several times by readers in recent weeks and months. It is about the problem that Microsoft has recently rolled out older versions of drivers for Windows 10 and Windows 11 via Windows Update. This naturally leads to problems on the affected systems. I have collected some cases.

A case from June 2023

I had addressed it here in the German blog, because Georg had reported problems with the automatic driver installation in June 2023. Since June 02, 2023, outdated drivers for the integrated graphics card (Intel HD 620 [Intel Corporation – Display – 27.20.100.8729]) and the external USB LAN adapter from Realtek (RTL8153(B)) were installed on Windows 10 Pro 22H2 without being asked. [Realtek – Extension – 10.44.0.2] installed, although he already disabled this via group policy on November 30, 2022.

According to his mail, Georg had to find out that the aforementioned group policy has been set to "default". Current drivers at that time were v31.0.101.2125 for the graphics card and v10.59.20.0420 for the Realtek USB LAN adapter. He later informed me that after reinstalling the current drivers, after manually triggering an update search, the "MS drivers" were reinstalled. Using registry changes (see this post) he was able to prevent the automatic driver installation. But it was only one system, on another system no old drivers were installed.

A case from October 2023

As of October 19, 2023, Michael then contacted me by mail complaining about problems with Windows 10, writing that he had "installed this month's optional update on his Windows 10 PC." Shortly before he had noticed very strange problems with my PC. The mouse no longer worked properly.

• The mouse pointer twitched across the screen and you could not click on elements properly.
• When clicking on a favorite, a double-click was triggered.

Even after adjusting the settings, the problem did not disappear. A different mouse did not bring any improvement either. The reader therefore decided to buy a new mouse on Monday, since the MX518 from Logitech was also a few days old.

The reader wrote that for a reason completely unknown to him, the problems disappeared on Monday, which were still noticeable on Sunday of it. The Logitech mouse works perfectly again. The threat of the mouse being replaced must have worked wonders. But all kidding aside, I didn't follow up on this message because KB5031445 was mentioned by the reader as an "optional update". However, this update was not generally released as a preview until October 26, 2023 (see Windows 10 22H2 Preview Update KB5031445 (October 26, 2023)). So, the reader must have been working with beta versions from the Insider Preview program as of October 19, 2023. It is not worth thinking about problems there – but in retrospect, the above problems might have to do with the following observation.

Windows installs old Logitech drivers

As of October 19, 2023, Marc-André also got in touch by mail and wrote about his observation that Microsoft is installing old Logitech drivers again under Windows 10 and Windows 11. He sent me the following screenshot:

In his case, this led to a Logitech C525 camera no longer working, for example. The reader noted that it is also exciting that the drivers from 2006 are active again when the drivers are completely uninstalled (including the checkmark that the drivers must be completely removed). Only if one deletes these old drivers again, the drivers from the year 2023 work again. The reader has reported it to Logitech and Microsoft support, but doubts that it will do any good.

Finally, the question: Has anyone else made similar observations? I've written several articles on driver installation here in the blog – among other things, administrators should have full control over driver installation in Windows since 2021 (see Windows administrators get full control over driver and firmware updates).

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