u/CallousHans

Yesterday I purchased a new bluetooth mouse. After putting my PC into sleep mode and waking it up again, I was unable to pair it. I tried connecting it on another PC and it worked first time; trying a different bluetooth device on my PC didn't work either. Several restarts later, I had the same issue, so I rather stupidly followed some advice to uninstall my bluetooth drivers. So begins the real nightmare.

I'm running windows 11 - updated to the most recent version - and have a AX3000 Asus WLAN and Bluetooth PCIe card. I attempted to uninstall all of my bluetooth drivers, though one of them kept appearing when I refreshed in Device Manager. At this point, bluetooth stops working entirely, and I have a little yellow warning sign on "Generic Bluetooth Adapter" in Device Manager. In spite of everything I go on to attempt, it remains this way. There are a number of hidden Bluetooth drivers alongside it, but this is the only one that doesn't appear greyed out. They are all Code 45, the Generic Bluetooth Adapter is Code 43.

ASUS page for my WLAN card has an installer for the card's drivers, so I downloaded it and used the installer to no avail. I tried finding a much newer version of the generic intel bluetooth driver which my WLAN card uses and installed that, still to no avail. I've used DISM and SFC in cmd - no issues apparently. I tried using the Bluetooth trouble shooter - which identifies that the Generic Bluetooth Driver needs reinstalling, resets and reinstalls it, but then finds that "Generic Bluetooth Adapter has a driver problem".

At some point I also uninstalled my WLAN drivers for the card, thinking they could be linked. This briefly broke my WiFi (as expected) but I was able to reinstall them by finding the drivers on the Microsoft Update Catalogue, downloading and installing them via Device Manager. The WiFi works fine. I have also attempted to install the Bluetooth drivers via Device Manager, and looked through the Update Catalogue for the drivers there, too.

At present I suspect that the drivers have corrupted and so can't be uninstalled properly, possibly because I left my bluetooth on as I initially uninstalled them (I know, ridiculous). I also deleted a default, empty Registry file at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\BTHPORT\Parameters\PerDevices. Which may have contributed to the corruption. It appears to be back there now.

Absolutely tearing my hair out at this point. Any ideas, folks?