Core Isolation Journey

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[RetiredGeek]

Hey Y’all,

Months ago I tried to get Core Isolation to work on my daily driver (Dell XPS 8920 i7-7700 32Gb DDR4 TPM and failed miserably due to all the incompatible drivers, mostly Logitech but also my Brother Printer.

Now that I have a new daily driver, this machine has been demoted to “canary” status so I thought I’d give it a try again.

Well getting rid of all those drivers was a task. Most couldn’t be deleted with out running explorer as Trusted Installer or Admin and in two cases I had to boot from a USB stick to get it done. However, success I deleted them all! Well, at least that is what I thought…

After a re-boot tried to enable Core Isolation and I got this:

So how do you get rid of a non-existent driver? Really, MS HOW?

So as with so many other problems I thought I’d do an Over-the-Top install to clean things up. Yeah RIGHT! I had an ISO already on a secondary drive so I mounted the iso and ran Setup.exe but when I barely got started the installer wouldn’t let me select the option to Keep Everything…

So I duly downloaded a fresh copy and was rewarded (I’m sure it’s a feature) with the same problem. So has MS finally disabled OTT installs?

And by the way I find this hilarious:

Yes boys and girls Microsoft can’t even recognize it’s own files.

Well I’m getting off to bed and I’ll reload by Image backup tomorrow when I’m less frustrated.

BTW: I almost forgot to mention that all those peripherals run just fine on my Minis-Forum Venus UM790 Pro with Core Isolation ENABLED.

May the Forces of good computing be with you!

RG

PowerShell & VBA Rule!
Computer Specs

• This topic was modified 12 months ago by RetiredGeek.

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Fred

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RetiredGeek wrote:

Months ago I tried to get Core Isolation to work on my daily driver … and failed miserably due to all the incompatible drivers, mostly Logitech but also my Brother Printer.

Hi RetiredGeeK:

Just an FYI that david S. posted about a similar problem with Core Isolation and a Brothers printer driver (BrUSBSib.sys) on a machine upgraded from Win 10 to Win 11 in their Dec 2022 topic Microsoft – Core Isolation – Memory Integrity in the Norton Tech Outpost. You won’t find a solution there (in the end I think they gave up and just decided to leave Core Isolation disabled) but david S. posted some of the advice they received from Brothers customer support in that topic that might point you in the right direction.

I did post <here> in that topic about using the PnPUtil command as instructed in Option # 4 of Brink’s ElevenForums tutorial Uninstall Driver in Windows 11 to manually remove the problematic BrUSBSib.sys driver from their driver store but warned them that PnpUtil should only be used by advanced users, so I don’t think david S. ever tried that suggestion.
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Imacri,

Thanks for your post.

I’ve already gotten rid of the drivers, although MS doesn’t appear to think so.

Right now I’d like to be able to do an OTT install but windows won’t let me choose the option to keep all of my applications and files.

I’ll take a look at your links just in case.

May the Forces of good computing be with you!

RG

PowerShell & VBA Rule!
Computer Specs

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Hey RG, have you looked for phantom devices in Device Manager?  They could be holding onto those pesky drivers.

Another option is to do a registry search for the drivers to clear them out.

Always create a fresh drive image before making system changes/Windows updates; you may need to start over!

We all have our own reasons for doing the things that we do with our systems; we don't need anyone's approval, and we don't all have to do the same things.

We were all once "Average Users".

Computer Specs

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This is likely way off base, but I had a Core Isolation issue a couple years ago with a PxHlpa64 driver.  The driver was installed when I loaded WIN DVD Pro.  I later went to Cyberlink Power DVD, but the suspect driver stayed behind and prevented Memory Integrity from activating on my WIN 10 machine, when I tried to go down that path.  However, deleting the driver disabled my optical drive.  I finally gave up, but months later I came across a post that said to delete the registry entries labeled Upper and Lower Class Filters.  I thought, “This is stupid.”   Amazingly, it worked.  Optical drive works fine, and Memory integrity is enabled.  So even though you have deleted the interfering drivers, there may be some registry entries that are messing things up. I tried to find the post but can’t locate it.

Casey H.

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windbg

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Hey Y’all,

Well, I’m back with another swipe at getting my “Canary” machine to accept Core Isolation. Starting with an Image Backup using IFW, JIC! Here’s what I did:

Starting Point: Windows 11 Pro 24H2 – Unsupported Hardware

Tools:
Nir-Soft SearchMyFiles
ExecTI.exe (Execute an application as Trusted Installer)
PowerToys: Text Extractor
NotePad++

1. Attempt to enable Core Isolation.
2. Copy offending driver list to a text file. Using Text Extractor to grab the list and copying to Notepad++.
3. Open a PowerShell instance using ExecTI
4. Use SearchMyFiles to search for the first offending driver. Searched the entire C: drive for thoroughness.
5. From the resulting list open the folder and copy the path using the right-click on Navigation Bar to capture the path (no typing errors this way).
6. In the PowerShell window use the Remove-Item -Path … -Force command to remove the file. Note, pasting the path in place of the … then adding the filename and enclosing the whole filespec in double quotes.
7. Rinse, Repeat…

This procedure allowed me to remove all but one driver, LVUSBS64.sys! I did some searching and found you needed to remove a Registry entry to free up this file. The instructions came with a warning that it might kill your sound!

1. Opened Regedit as Admin.
2. Navigated to: HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\LUUSBS64
3. Deleted the entry. (I know I could have accomplished this with PowerShell but I wanted to lay eyes on it to make sure I got it right. Always be careful witht the registry.
4. Rebooted.
5. Repeated the procedure above, SUCCESS!
6. Rebooted.
7. Enable Core Isolation, SUCCESS!
8. Tested Audio, FAILURE!!!!!! Looks like the warnings were warrented!

So, what to do next? Live with it and restore my Image or Bite-the-Bulled and do a Clean Install? Well Clean Install won the battle and after 8 hours of work I have a pretty close-to-the-way-it-was system with Core Isolation Enabled.

As a side benefit I now have my Microsoft 365 out of the Insider System. Unfortunately, it seems I’m stuck on the Current Channel as my PowerShell program will not change it any longer! Looks like MS is bent on keeping us lowly non-Enterprise customers as guinea pigs.

All-in-all it was a valuable learning experience as I’ve learned a few new tricks, reaffirmed my belief in Image backups (I would not have tried it w/o them), and got a cleaner system in the process. Of course, as always YMMV!

May the Forces of good computing be with you!

RG

PowerShell & VBA Rule!
Computer Specs

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Fred, PL1

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