USB Scanner Name Increments in Device Manager

[rodneyws]

On numerous XP Professional PCs, I have observed a behavior where the scanner's name in the device manager will be followed by "#2" or "#3". The scanner's functionality within the Windows environment is fine, but unfortunately my employer uses an antiquated program that is hard-coded to work with the exact name of the device in the device manager. In other words... when the scanner's listed name increments from #2 to #3, our application is still looking for #2 and thus can't scan.

I have turned the Internet upside down looking for solutions to this problem. I felt I was getting close when I downloaded and used devcon to manually remove devices from the Device Manager. This behavior has been observed on scanners, web cams and even network cards.

Any help in this matter would be greatly appreciated.

 

[BadBigBen]

That is unfortunately, a designed behavior of the Plug-n-Pray feature... and usually happens with USB devices such as Printers and scanners (and as you noted NICs)...

the only fix would be to do some surgery in the Registry...

They can be found under the following KEY:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Enum

subkeys like PCI and USB is where to look...

Ben
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