Ghost Devices in 20H2 Device Manager

The only ghost devices I see in my device manager are devices that I once had connected to my computer and no longer are connected.

You need to click on Show Hidden Devices in Device Manager. That's where I found orphaned devices on a clean install of 20H2. It has an error code of 45 which means not connected.

This is definitely a widespread issue. I've seen it on every machine where I've installed 20H2. If you look in Services, you'll also find that the Hyper-V Guest Integration services (6 or 7 of them) have also been installed. There's also a couple of ghost Xeon processors in addition to the items you listed.

I think someone at Microsoft messed up and forgot to clean out devices and services before they created the install media for 20H2. For those on 20H2 who aren't seeing these ghost items, set the following system environment variable:

devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices = 1

and also make sure that you have selected Show Hidden Devices in Device Manager.

The devices themselves aren't so bad I suppose but I don't know how having Hyper-V integration services could affect some systems. Hopefully we will get a comment from Microsoft about this soon since it's unquestionably happening on every install.

Is there a way to clean theses out? Also can you report this to Microsoft and have them update the install media?

I just deleted them one by one. I also deleted the Hyper-V Infrastructure driver or whatever even though it wasn't ghosted because I don't use Hyper-V at all. Removing the services requires use of sc.exe to delete the services. I have no way to report this to Microsoft. Any report I made would likely not be understood since this is a very obscure issue. We can only hope that someone with connections at MS sees this and reports it.

NineD said:

I just deleted them one by one. I also deleted the Hyper-V Infrastructure driver or whatever even though it wasn't ghosted because I don't use Hyper-V at all. Removing the services requires use of sc.exe to delete the services. I have no way to report this to Microsoft. Any report I made would likely not be understood since this is a very obscure issue. We can only hope that someone with connections at MS sees this and reports it.

Do they stay gone after a reboot?

Yes they stay gone. Nothing comes back after a reboot. I'm guessing that this represents the hardware on the VM that was used for creation of the installation media and someone forgot to run whatever procedure is necessary to remove those hardware and service references.

If you use the The Update Assistant it is a micro bug. you a right they forget to remove the procedure.

@NineD,
Plausible theory - thanks for sharing this information.