Unable to remove Bluetooth devices

Posted in PC Matters on Dec 31st, 2021

Recently, I have been having a plethora of apparent Bluetooth issues ranging from devices randomly connecting and disconnecting, working/failing intermittently, not being able to remove Bluetooth devices as in “remove failed” and Windows 10 “helpfully” reinstalling Bluetooth unwanted and problematic devices.

After some trawling, I tried some of the true and tested remedies like:

  • Open Device Manager
  • Select Bluetooth
  • Select View and check “Show Hidden Devices”
  • Remove all entries for the device (there might be related entries that do not contain the friendly name of the device in question, I tend to remove all inactive devices)
  • And rebooting

This did not work in my case as the “friendly” Windows 10 decided to keep reinstalling the devices.

Further trawling suggested I download an old set of Bluetooth Powershell command-line tools and run their “btpair -u”command i.e. unpair all inactive devices, see this thread in TenForums. This successfully removed one of the offending items but left others.

Pennywise, Pound foolish, an old adage that came back to haunt me.

I had an old Bluetooth card that Windows said was not working as the drivers were outdated but when I went to update drivers, Windows said that the best driver was installed. I finally gave up, disabled the card and bought a new Bluetooth dongle.

Problems began with, you guessed it, a Windows update. My Bluetooth soundbar stopped working and could not be removed.

After going through the usual trawling and attempts, I decided to go back to basics and recommenced my troubleshooting checklist.

CC Cleaner reported outdated drivers and more importantly a Bluetooth driver conflict. I bit the bullet and purchased the Pro version and ran through the full health check. All drivers were updated but I could still not remove my soundbar. Disabling the old card did not help.

On a hunch, I removed the new Bluetooth dongle and, lo and behold, everything started working again.

The Bluetooth dongle cost me A$36, an annual subscription to CC Cleaner Pro with a discount cost US$29.95. It would have been worth it at full price with all the other problems it resolved.

I’ll definitely be renewing the subscription next year.