I joined this forum JUST to say THANK YOU! -
My PH-BTH3 Bluetooth Headphones trouble began with a driver update that 3DP (a driver finder program that is free but sometimes buggy). It found a new Toshiba Bluetooth Driver Stack update. I thought since it found many, many other drivers I needed and it fixed many issues I had in the past. So I was shocked when the Toshiba driver made a horrible popping in and out of sound but loaded the headphones fine. Sadly my original pairing of the headphones using the Windows update drivers had worked fine since day one. I simply went to "show all devices" and then selected "Add Bluetooth Device" and everything just worked!
So of course I needed to rollback and get rid of the Toshiba update (which should have been hassle free). I uninstalled and rebooted and the horror began!
My Bluetooth dongle is the CSR 8510 A10 (CSR8510A10). It was now showing the PH-BTH3 headphones as paired (within the CSR 8510 driver settings as well as all bluetooth driver references. The Toshiba driver had altered the way Windows loaded my drivers regardless of how I installed/uninstalled the Toshiba driver as well as trying the broadcom and Intel drivers. So now the headphones were not paired (but reboot after reboot there the headphones appeared listed in Windows even though I had already uninstalled, unpaired.
In fact I searched for over 2 months online for help.
This is the common reply you get on most sites -
I never received a driver for my headphones as others have mentioned. So I thought there never was a driver for the PH-BTH3's as my head hones were new off Amazon this last Christmas (and most devices shipped like this generally assume you will update via Windows update).
So to resolve my "newly created issue" I knew I needed to
delete every registry entry for the bluetooth drivers entries and that took so much time. Windows seems to have a hard time releasing devices in general but with Bluetooth it is especially sticky.
I had to search "PH-BTH3" in the registry. I had over 16 entries in the registry alone. In many folders within REGEDIT I was stuck having to take ownership of the folders, then I learned some folders are "placeholders" and cannot be deleted but you need to delete each entry in the folder that it allows (all but the top most entry will be deleted). If you miss just one of the driver references it will fail again on reboot and you will have to continue your search and deleting process.
THEN.... I had to go to Device Manager and change "View Settings" to "Show Hidden Devices" and then go into each hardware item and delete anything related to Bluetooth (I was amazed at all the entries including several "unknown devices") and my headphones appearing in the system folder.
So with all devices deleted from "Device Manager" and all "Registry Entries for the headphones and dongle" deleted.......
- - I rebooted and left the Bluetooth dongle unplugged.
- - Ran the driver installation (THANK YOU AGAIN!)
- - Rebooted the system
- - Plugged in the CSR 8510 A10 bluetooth dongle
- - Then rebooted (better to be safe, always).
- - Right clicked on the newly created bluetooth trayicon and selected "Enable" and added my headphones.
Things are perfect now and the headphones are sync'd like they had been before the Toshiba screw up. I certainly do hope that others with my problem find this post to aid them. I wish I could post this at the 25 or so sites with almost no good information I came across.
This issue exists for so many users and I noticed it is across all the platforms. I am on the Windows 10 LTSB OS and it seems about the process that you would use from 7 until 10.
Quick breakdown on registry editing, deleting, etc. When the basic removing device fails and uninstalling from device manager fails this is the process that WILL WORK! Be sure to read up on registry editing before jumping into it. You will need to run REGEDIT as an ADMIN (right click on REGEDIT icon and select "run as administrator" then you will heed to select "Edit, then Find now search for the headphone model number or the maker name as well as any other device that is giving you a lot of trouble (I mean after rebooting, after doing all the right things) and no other method is allowing proper functionality.