Gosh, stubborn software can be the worst.

As it tuns out, Air Display really isn’t compatible with Windows 10.

It’s not listed as compatible, and many people have complained that the Windows 10 Upgrade Assistant had blocked them from upgrading over Air Display. Trouble is, I was already running Windows 10, and now the uninstaller would never complete – instead rolling back without a single error message.

Furthermore, its driver would never remove from Device Manager – scanning for new devices would make the Air Display monitor device reappear!?

I did some digging into the msi logs, and discovered that the cause was during the driver removal stage.

So, listing the *.inf drivers:

C:\Program Files\Avatron\Air Display\driver

AirDisplayMirror.inf

AirDisplayWDDM.inf

AVPCIFilter.inf

Ah-ha! The root cause was AVPCIFilter.inf – a so-called “PCI filter driver” which didn’t seem to have its own entry in device manager. It was responsible for presumably the other devices to reappear on removal.

I couldn’t invoke rundll to uninstall AVPCIFilter.inf (never got the hang of inf setups), so I have to do its dirty work myself:

The solution – Removing Air Display for realz

Navigating to the following registry key:

regjump HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E97D-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}

There should be a value of the name UpperFilters with the value AVPCIFilter. Edit this value to remove AVPCIFilter. I simply deleted the entire value since AVPCIFilter was its only item. (The UpperFilters value was created by Air Display as it didn’t exist on my other clean Windows 10 system.)

Next, I deleted the service…

sc delete AVPCIFilter

… and finally, deleted the driver file.

C:\Windows\System32\drivers\AVPCIFilter.sys

After rebooting, the Air Display WDDM devices did not appear anymore in device manager – success!

Use pnputil to remove any remaining Avatron INFs

To get rid of the Air Display Support item in Add\Remove Programs, I used the handy Program Install and Uninstall Troubleshooting Wizard. No need for MSIZAP.