Good evening everyone,

Been a long time lurker of the 8 and 10 forums, was a member of the 7 forums back in the day. Anyway, I have me a fun little problem that is making me lose hair and I am hopeful someone here can help.

I had a Gigabyte motherboard that died and was replaced under warranty. The replacement was a Z97-HD3 which was a slight upgrade on the one that I had before because they didn't have any replacements for my version. While I was awaiting replacement I had an Asus motherboard as a loan from the shop.

Once the new permanent board was installed I have had no end of issues with my Windows 10 PC:

  • I am unable to shutdown or restart the PC, the blue spinning screen lasts ages, then the screen goes black but the fan and lights remain on
  • I am unable to install windows updates (suspect this is due to the above)
  • I cannot install new NVidea drivers as the installer hangs on "Installing Drivers"
  • Scanning for hardware changes in device manager is eternal


These are the things that I have tried:
  • SFC /Scannow
    • Returns a single issue of OpenCL.dll being corrupt (so basically a non-issue as this is normal)

  • Disabling the Intel MEI
  • Uninstalling the Intel MEI so that it will install the version it wants
  • Rebooting to Safe Mode
    • Curiously there are no issues in Safe Mode, though Windows Installer won't run so I cannot test the driver install

  • Booting to Ubuntu
    • Everything works normally

  • Manually updating the Intel MEI and Chipset Device Software
    • Former has no effect on driver, latter hangs

  • Run MalwareBytes in Safe Mode
  • Run Windows Defender
  • Run Spybot S&D
  • Run Intel Driver Utility program
    • Only identified the Chipset Device Software as being out of date


Based on all of the above I believe the core issue is I have some incorrect hardware drivers, but I have no idea how to identify which ones may be causing the problems. The only software change (bar game patches) that occurred between the old and new MoBo's was a windows update that installed something for the Asus motherboard.

While I can go the whole PC Reset route, I desperately do not want to.

Anyone got any ideas?