Removing Old Bluetooth COM/Serial Ports [ Resolved ]

[Glitch]

Hi,

I have a bluetooth GPS device I borrowed from a friend. Unfortunately, it has a nasty habit of losing the connection with the PC and needing to be deleted and re-added.

I can live with this, but unfortunately it commandeers two COM port numbers as "Standard Serial over Bluetooth Link" devices every time, and for whatever reason, the old ones still behave as if they're in use, so it doesn't reuse them, and they're basically lost in the ether. So by now I'm up to COM9 and COM10. This is getting to be a problem as some applications won't recognize anything past COM4 or COM6.

They don't show up in Device Manager, even when View/Show Hidden Devices is checked, so I can't remove them. I can find them in the Registry under HKLM\CurrentControlSet\Enum\BTHENUM, but of course this is protected by WRP.

So, I have no idea how to remove these (now) unused ports, nor how to convince Windows to re-use them.

I don't know that it matters, but this is Vista Home Premium with the Widcomm bluetooth stack.

Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks!
--Asten

[Steve]

Hi Glitch,

not sure how to remove the ports, but....

try run regedit as administrator by right clicking on the regedit shortcut and select "Run As Administrator".

This might help you delete the part of the registry you want. Make sure you export the values first....just in case....

regards

Steve

[Glitch]

Thanks for the reply.

Unfortunately, I've tried this and more... I unhid the Administrator account and logged in as that. I even managed to set full permissions for Administrator to the Registry keys in question, but it still wouldn't allow me to delete them.

I'm at wit's end!

[Steve]

Hi Glitch,

did you try delete them in safe mode. Hopefully whatever is using them may not be loaded in Safe Mode

regards

Steve

[Glitch]

Another good suggestion, but alas, this too i tried.

I also tried a VistaPE disk i made, and in both this and safe mode, but in these states, the offending registry entries aren't there anymore

Something in the driver is actively loading these, but I can't figure it out.

[Steve]

Hi Glitch,

you could try and disable the com ports in the BIOS and then try delete them in safe mode. See what happens

regards

Steve

[Glitch]

In this case, they are 'virtual' bluetooth COM ports. The BIOS doesn't see them. They are created by the Widcomm bluetooth driver.

I even tried removing the bluetooth software entirely, uninstalling the bluetooth device, but upon reinstalling, the ports are still 'used'.

[Glitch]

Okay! I recovered my COM ports.

Here's how, in case anyone else runs into this.

In Device Manager, Properties for one of the ones that DOES show up (there are 2 for a GPS device, incoming and outgoing), on the "Port Settings" Then "Advanced". At the bottom, you can choose the COM port.

All you have to do is change it to one of the "used" COM ports, which show up as
COM2 (in use)

It gives you a warning, but you can do it if you want. Do that for all of them, and life is good again.

Thanks for your suggestions, though!

[Steve]

Great News Glitch,

glad your problem is sorted. Well investigated..

Thanks very much for getting back to us and letting us know how you solved it,

regards

Steve