Occasionally you’ll find the need to manually remove a printer driver, and it may put up a fight saying it’s still in use and can’t be removed. One way or another you can remove this but it requires a reboot, whether you boot into Safe Mode and remove it, or do it my preferred way:
- Open
regedit - In 32-bit browse to
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Print\Environments\Windows NT x86\Drivers\Version-3\Printer_Model\InfPath, or 64-bit browse toHKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Print\Environments\Windows x64\Drivers\Version-3\Printer_Model\InfPath - Delete the key representing the printer in question. This will disable the computer from loading its driver at startup.
- Reboot, and you may want to manually delete the driver files. Their locations can be found in Print Management (
printmanagement.msc)