I turned off Bluetooth by right-clicking on the icon in the tray. I disabled Bluetooth in the control panel. And still, in the task manager, I find two items: Bluetooth Stack COM Server and Bluetooth Tray Application. I don't own a single Bluetooth device. I do own a slow-ass netbook. I want to get rid of these drags on my system.
I've read suggestions here on how to turn off Bluetooth in the BIOS. Possible? A good idea? Any other reasonable way to get rid of it?
You can turn off both items in Control Panel/Administrative Tools/Services - set them both to 'disabled'. You should also find the tray application in your 'programs & features' so try uninstalling it from there. "I've always been mad, I know I've been mad, like the most of us..." Pink Floyd
I disabled both services as above, which took care of most of the problem. When I went to uninstall everything related to bluetooth, though, I got an odd error message and looked it up, and I'm glad I did: apparently a known and not infrequent bug in certain versions of the Widcomm bluetooth software is that UNINSTALLING THE SOFTWARE ERASES YOUR HARD DRIVE. Sounds like freaky internet rumor, but I found so many instances of the same complaint (here's one example: http://en.community.dell.com/suppor... ) that I decided to just leave it alone.
There is a small standalone program from Microsoft that you can use to disable ( not uninstall ) all instances of bluetooth software that starts from everywhere in your particular system when Windows starts. CoolGuy