Carlos M. Martinez-Cagnazzo

My laptop's x64 Win Vista Driver Store got corrupted yesterday, after a CHKDSK was performed on the C: drive. How did I realize this? Because I tried to install a printer and got bizarre errors and an empty driver list (where Windows will usually list tons of drivers)

I followed the steps mentioned in this post, and the basically worked, now I can see the full list of printer drivers. In short, the steps are:

1. Go to your %SYSTEMROOT%/inf folder (usually C:\WINDOWS\inf)
2. Delete the following files:
3. DEL DRVINDEX.DAT
   DEL INFPUB.DAT
   DEL INFSTOR.DAT
   DEL INFSTRNG.DAT
   DEL INFCACHE.*
   DEL SETUPAPI.*
4. Re-install a device and the driver cache will be automatically rebuild by Vista.

Now, the problem is that these files are system files and you will not be able to easily delete them, even if you are a member of the Administrators group. One possibility is to boot from the Vista DVD and use the "Recovery Console". This should work fairly well.

However, since I did not have a Vista DVD handy, I used this registry hack to take ownership of the files easily and delete them from Windows Explorer. I did not even had to reboot to recover the driver cache.

Below I attach the registry hack for your convenience.