Concerning your comments on the 'Elusive Missing PCI Device' the following is an adaptation from another suggestion on how to deal with a particular missing device driver. In many cases there simply isn't an existing Device Driver necessary and in order to simply remove the 'Question Mark' from your System Device Hardware in Control Panel you can use the following. I believe that it will work with almost any of the System Hardware Devices (so long as the Device Driver is not actually necessary).

CONTROL PANEL SYSTEM DEVICE DELETION

Many people have disabled a device in their device manager to avoid conflicts with other devices. The device is usually known to cause conflicts with various onboard devices and other add in cards, or a driver for same simply cannot be found since the device is non-operational so we all disable it. Well, let's get that device out of the tree so we can concentrate on other things.

1) go to the system tab in control panel and there choose hardware profiles.
There, choose copy, and name the profile something like "TEST" or "Profile
2".

2) Disable the particular device in the device manager. Reboot your machine,
choose your new hardware profile "TEST" or "Profile 2" when prompted. It is
an exact copy of the original so everything will run fine. Disable that same device here also. Then uncheck the box that says "Exists in all
hardware profiles".

3) Reboot and choose original configuration for hardware profiles and make
sure the settings of "disabled" etc are the same.

4) Reboot and choose your new hardware profile "TEST" or "profile 2" and
here Delete the device. A box will appear asking "remove from which
hardware profile" and you should choose "original configuration".

5) Reboot and choose "original configuration" and verify the device is gone.
If so, go to the hardware profile Tab and delete your second hardware
profile.

6) Now the device does not appear anywhere in your tree. It is not
using any resources, has no conflicts, and cannot be seen.

Is this meant as a reply to an earlier message, or a general "how to" for some version of Windows?

Messages (or possibly 'announcements') such as this one always have me wondering about the rationale behind them (self publication or PSA?)

We've heard that a million monkeys at a million keyboards could produce the complete works of Shakespeare; now, thanks to the Internet, we know that is not true

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