Multiple phantom "Standard Serial over Bluetooth link entries in Device Manager (XP)

Question

I have an XP machine here that is used to test bluetooth devices. After several hundred devices tested, we now have 126 com ports listed in Device Manager (Win XP Home). One is a physical com port on Com 1 in the computer, one is a serial-USB adapter that is physically connected and the rest are phantom. It takes forever for our software to "discover" the device with so many com ports.

How can I clear out all the unused com ports?

Answer 1

Thank you for the reply but the procedure did not solve the issue. I followed the steps to the letter then rebooted. After the reboot I plugged one of our bluetooth dongles in and Device Manager was repopulated with approximately 126 "Standard Serial Over Bluetooth Link" entries again.

Any other suggestions?

Thanks,

Ken Long

Albuquerque

Answer 2

Hi,

You may follow these steps to remove unused COM ports:

a. Uninstall any USB-serial converter drivers or other com port add-in PC cards or PCI cards in the Device Manager. Do this by right clicking on the device in the Ports branch of Device Manager. If you have any kind of multiport serial adapters, uninstall those as well. After they are uninstalled, unplug the USB-serial converter(s)

b. Click Start | Run, type RegEdit and then click OK.

c. Navigate to the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\COM Name Arbiter key.

d. Highlight COM Name Arbiter.

e. Select File | Export.

f. Pick a suitable name and location to save this file. Note where you put it. In case of problems, you can restore exactly where you were with this branch by running RegEdit and clicking File | Import to import this file.

g. Right-click on the ComDB entry on the right side of the window, and then click Modify.

h. On the Edit Binary Data window, highlight all the values and delete them (set them to 0) by hitting the delete key on the keyboard. Do not delete the ComDB key, just clear the value data (set it to zero) and then click OK.

Important: This section, method, or task contains steps that tell you how to modify the registry. However, serious problems might occur if you modify the registry incorrectly. Therefore, make sure that you follow these steps carefully. For added protection, back up the registry before you modify it. Then, you can restore the registry if a problem occurs. For more information about how to back up and restore the registry, click the following link.

**http://support.microsoft.com/kb/322756******