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[BUG] you need to take this down

Open ooogerman opened this issue 7 months ago • 2 comments

your app doesn’t work and in turn has fried my motherboard. You have somehow managed to remove my drivers stop them from being reinstalled and now I can no longer boot into bios and you started to draw a lot of power out of my usb ports

ooogerman avatar May 23 '25 10:05 ooogerman

This happened to me too! Didn't fry my motherboard, but it did destroy windows beyond repair. Happened while I uninstalled the drivers. It restarted the PC, which was now stuck on the Windows lock screen. Neither my USB keyboard, USB mouse, nor a PS/2 keyboard were detected or functional (in all forms of Safe Mode, too). The system was effectively soft-bricked.

The issue was not a simple driver problem. The corruption was at a deep system level. I tried a bunch of things from the windows recovery environment , all of which failed to fix the issue:

Now I don't know what this means, but I did these things while following Gemini:

  • A forced reinstallation of all 731 drivers from the Windows DriverStore completed but did not resolve the issue. (How is this even possible?)
  • Registry Check (regedit):
    • The UpperFilters for both Keyboard and Mouse classes were checked and found to be correct (containing only kbdclass and mouclass).
    • The Start value for the kbdclass and mouclass services were found to be incorrectly set to 3 (Demand). Even after manually correcting them to 1 (Boot), the drivers still failed to function on restart.
  • System Integrity Checks:
    • sfc /scannow reported no integrity violations.
    • chkdsk /f /r completed and found no errors on the drive.
  • Boot Configuration (bootrec): The bootrec /rebuildbcd command failed catastrophically, reporting "Total identified Windows installations: 0". (How is this even possible? It is literally booting, just stuck on the lock screen)
  • Boot Logging (ntbtlog.txt): As a final step, the boot log revealed that the system believed it was successfully loading kbdclass.sys and mouclass.sys, confirming the failure was happening at a higher level (likely PnP Manager or Session Manager) after the drivers were loaded.

My only option is to reinstall windows now. This program alone has caused more damage than literally every virus I ever got growing up.

kimcen avatar Jul 18 '25 23:07 kimcen

I've been using BetterJoy for years without encountering a single major issue. What you likely had issue with were the bundled ViGEmBus and HidGuardian drivers. They are both deprecated and severely outdated (particularly HidGuardian). Your issues in particular were likely caused by improper removal of HidGuardian, The author of HidGuardian has an article about this. In fact he even has a sequel to it for HidHide, HidGuardian's successor.

If you are reading this and want to run BetterJoy(or any other software dependent on ViGEmBus, which is pretty much nearly every advanced controller software) and/or are scared of issues:

  1. Download the definitively last (it will likely never be updated again, so let's hope Windows Updates don't brick it) release of ViGEmBus from the author's github here.
  2. Run BetterJoyForCemu.exe
  3. Done

Optionally, you may delete the drivers folder from BetterJoyForCemu to avoid accidentally installing them. You only need the updated ViGEmBus. It is extremely unlikely that you will ever need the functionality offered by HIDGuardian or HIDHide.

Now I don't know what this means, but I did these things while following Gemini The issue was not a simple driver problem. The corruption was at a deep system level

It was not "corruption" and none of the troubleshooting steps suggested by Gemini helped because improperly uninstalling HID Guardian didn't touch any of your drivers. The improperly uninstalled HID Guardian simply kept sitting there as a filter between the OS and your actual device drivers, blocking all of your inputs.


That being said, while I understand the author of BetterJoy has been very busy with IRL, it would be prudent of him to re-release the current release build, bundling it with just the updated ViGEmBus and not the landmine of a driver that is Hid Guardian.

Nereithr avatar Aug 16 '25 21:08 Nereithr