Problems:
Daughter in Hawaii, me in Colorado. She gets TV cable service with internet access. Cable guy goes to install network card(Ethernet) in her PC (Dell Win 95). Checks in Device Manager, and notices an extra pci bus with yellow exclamation point under 'Other Devices'. Refuses to install network card, or even try it 'because I've been told it won't work if I see any problem in Device Manager'. Daughter cannot remove the device - Windows says she's trying to remove a category. Regular pci bus devices are all set up under System Devices where they belong. The computer is stable and everything works on it. She has now been into Add/Remove Hardware manually, trying to do something, and has added two or three more devices of various kinds without drivers. Now she has several non-existing halfway installed devices, but Windows won't let her remove any of them.

I (her systems genius Dad) really want to get this working, so I can at least get e-mail from her!

I told her I'd check on this forum, and if we can't get device manager cleaned up, she might go buy her own Ethernet card and install it, and see if the cable guy will use it. Help!

Boot into Safe Mode and remove all devices under each category, and reboot. Do this one category at a time, to avoid confusion.

Click the plus (+) beside each category to see what devices are installed. Those are the ones you remove, not the category itself.

In many cases you will need to have the Windows CD handy when rebooting, to install drivers from it.

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Soon as I come up with all the answers...they change the questions!!

Computer Information Links (http://www.geocities.com/paleopete/)

That's the weird part...when she does hit the + sign, highlights the "device" and tries to remove it, she gets the 'you're trying to remove a category' message. Is it because the device was never really there? Or she didn't install drivers for it? I dunno. She has not tried removing any of them in safe mode though, maybe that's the trick.

The support person in chat mode I worked with yesteday encouraged us to slap our own Ethernet card in, set up tcp/ip, and then call the local office to bring out their cable modem and hook her up. I've done enough Ethernet and networking setups that this is OK with me, even though ridiculous. I don't think her floating non-existant devices will keep her from getting networked.