duplicate hardware devices in control panel

Hello. In the Safe Mode, when looking in Control Panel
and going further into the Device Manager, many of my
hardware devices (maybe 10 or so) show exact duplicate
hardware devices - mostly these 10 or so have two
duplicates - but one or two even have three duplicates.
If I try to remove one (usually I try the top one of the
pair or triplet) - in most cases when I reboot the
operating system does a reinstall on what I had just
removed.

A.) Is there any way to tell which of the two (or three)
might be redundant and unnecessary; B.) is there a simple
way to let the system take these out?

Also, I did find something on the internet that I tried,
which was running Dxdiag -ghost and that ended up showing
no "ghost" drivers. Although I did run that from a normal
Windows reboot and not in the Safe Mode. When I went back
to the Safe Mode after that, all those duplicates were
still there. Thanks for you help. Bob

In safe mode, delete all of the multiple devices, and let the system install
a new one. Note that multiple devices probably isn't causing a problem,
although in some cases cleaning out multiple devices does help for
particular issues.
--
Jeff Richards
MS MVP (DTS)
"bob" wrote in message
...
Hello. In the Safe Mode, when looking in Control Panel
and going further into the Device Manager, many of my
hardware devices (maybe 10 or so) show exact duplicate
hardware devices - mostly these 10 or so have two
duplicates - but one or two even have three duplicates.
If I try to remove one (usually I try the top one of the
pair or triplet) - in most cases when I reboot the
operating system does a reinstall on what I had just
removed.

A.) Is there any way to tell which of the two (or three)
might be redundant and unnecessary; B.) is there a simple
way to let the system take these out?

Also, I did find something on the internet that I tried,
which was running Dxdiag -ghost and that ended up showing
no "ghost" drivers. Although I did run that from a normal
Windows reboot and not in the Safe Mode. When I went back
to the Safe Mode after that, all those duplicates were
still there. Thanks for you help. Bob