I have phantom serial ports in Windows XP. How can I remove them?
The first step of removing the phantom ports is to remove all non-standard COM ports (remove any Multi-port serial adapters from the device manager).
Most likely there are leftover entries in the registry. You can run regedit to remove the extra entries.
- NOTE: make a backup of the registry prior to taking any of the following steps. You edit the registry at your own risk.
Run regedit. Go to: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SYSTEM/CurrentControlSet/Control/COM Name Arbiter
Your system probably has:
- The Data field of COMDB = FF FF FF 03 (or something similar).
It should have:
- COMDB = 03 00 00 00, if you have 2 built-in serial ports (or 01 00 00 00 if you only have one built-in COM port).
- NOTE: 03 in binary is 0000 0011 so the lowest bit set (the 1 on the right) mean