Can't stop nVidia HD audio driver from loading  

This PC is running an ATI Radeon graphics card on an MSI motherboard with an Intel processor.

Recently I removed an NVidia graphics card and replaced it with the current ATI one.

All of the nVida software uninstalled without error. All of the ATI software installed without error.

Yet, even though it now has an ATI HD Audio driver, along with the original Realtek audio driver, it is still loading the NVidia Hd Audio driver. I uninstall it with Device Manager and it reinstalls the next time I rescan for hardware changes or reboot.

I've even tried Driver Fusion to remove it and it deletes all of the associated registry keys it finds but it still reinstalls after a reboot.

This is making me nuts. Can anyone help me with this?

Thanks in advance.

I first tried to update the Realtek driver but it said that I already had the latest one. Then I uninstalled it and reinstalled. At first it appeared that it had worked. I had the AMD high def device entry and a Realtek high def device entry and a third that simply said "High Definition Audio Device". There were no indicators of issues, known or unknown. Then as I was looking at it up popped a box saying "downloading driver" and shortly afterwards the high def audio device entry had been replaced by the NVIDIA device again.

I have already deleted everything that I could from the registry. First I used Driver Fusion in Safe Mode and it deleted all it found. Then I laboriously went through and manually deleted all of the entries that it would let me delete. There were a couple of entries in the enumeration section that it would not let me delete nor would it let me update ownership and permissions in order to delete them.

In Device Manager under System Devices there are two High Definition Audio Controllers, one on PCI bus 0 and the other on PCI bus 1. If I disable the first one it removes the AMD High Definition Device from the Sound, Video and Game Controller section. If I disable the second one it removes the NVIDIA and Realtek device entries.

For the life of me I can't figure out why it thinks it has an NVIDIA device.

Thanks. I am a long time user of Driver Sweeper which is now Driver Fusion. It did find and remove some entries -- see original post -- but did not solve the problem.

Clearly, whenever Windows 7 enumerates the hardware it is finding what it is identifying as NVIDIA High Definition Audio. The only entries left in my registry are in the hardware enumeration section and, as I explained above, I cannot delete them.

Thanks for hanging with me on this.

Well, the clue was the fact that there were entries for NVIDIA in the Registry's enumeration section that I could not delete. Even though the device had been uninstalled those entries remained.

I have run things like CCleaner and Driver Sweeper/Fusion on this problem but only after uninstalling the device through Device Manager and, as I said, it would reinstall each time. This time I didn't uninstall the device, I disabled it before running the cleaner. When I rebooted it did not install anything but the NVIDIA entry was still there. I then re-enabled it and uninstalled it and re-booted the PC. When it came back up it did detect new hardware and installed a driver but it was the default Windows high definition audio driver, not the NVIDIA one.

It looks like the secret was disabling the device before running the cleaners.

Thanks so much for your help with this.

Regards,