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fun with Intel Bluetooth driver updates on Windows 10

Alexander Bochmann Sunday 24 of December, 2023
I recently tried to upgrade the Windows 10 Bluetooth drivers on an ThinkPad T490 with an Intel Wireless-AC 9560 chipset from the version supplied by Lenovo (22) to the latest Intel drivers (23 - BT-23.10.0-64UWD-Win10-Win11.exe at this time).

After installing the driver package, existing Bluetooth devices were inaccessible, and deletion from the Bluetooth settings panel was blocked ("remove failed"), even after removing corresponding devices from Device Manager. Looking at the Registry, it turned out that it was also not possible to manually delete associated registry entries, which now belonged to an unknown SID. (Maybe I could have replaced ownership on those entries, but they have a bunch of subdirectories, each of which would have had to be reclaimed individually...)

My solution was to uninstall the new Intel Bluetooth drivers: Windows then reinstalled the old version, and with those active, it was possible to properly delete all existing BT devices. With those cleaned away, I ran the new driver package installer another time, and re-paired all devices from scratch.