Saturday, December 8, 2018

windows - How do I get rid of these "There is a problem with your tablet driver" messages?



Every time I run certain applications (including but not limited to GIMP, Microsoft Visual Studio, and 3DS Max), I get the following message box:





There is a problem with your tablet driver. Please reboot your system. If the problem persists reinstall or update the driver.




Obviously I've tried rebooting and that hasn't fixed anything. Secondly, I'm not running a tablet PC. This is just Windows XP SP3 running on a Dell Precision PWS490 desktop workstation.



How do I get rid of these error messages? The applications still load normally after dismissing them, but they're rather annoying.



Using Process Explorer, I got the call stack from the message box. It's coming from wintab32.dll. Here's the call stack when running GIMP (irrelevant frames omitted):




...
8 USER32.dll!MessageBoxA+0x45
9 wintab32.dll!WTMgrPacketHookExA+0x44a
10 libgdk-win32-2.0-0.dll!gdk_display_list_devices+0x37
...


So, does anyone know how I can get an updated version of wintab32.dll or have any other ideas? I've been keeping my system up to date with Windows Updates. The timestamp on wintab32.dll is 2007-03-30 17:38, and its MD5 sum is ffdc332007c9dc6dd346c8ac2b09a015.







UPDATE:



I've tried uninstalling a bunch of Wacom HID drivers as per BloodPhilia's suggestion and rebooting, but sadly this problem is still occurring. One driver, Virtual Keyboard Driver, will not let me uninstall it (the "Device usage" combo box is disabled), and another one, Virtual Keyboard Interface, reappeared after rebooting even though I'd uninstalled it:



Device Manager screenshot



Driver Details for the the VKD points to C:\WINDOWS\system32\DRIVERS\WacomVKHid.sys, and for the VKI yields the error "No driver files are required or have been loaded for this device.". Attempting "Update Driver" for both of them yields no results.




Any idea on how to uninstall this Virtual Keyboard Driver?








There was some software installed named "Tablet" in C:\Program Files\Tablet. Removing it via the Add/Remove Programs dialog finally made these error messages go away:



Add/Remove Programs dialog screenshot




Uninstalling this also deleted C:\WINDOWS\system32\Wintab32.dll (though for some reason there's also a Wintab32.dll in C:\i386, but I don't think that's being used since it's not in my %Path%).


Answer



This is caused by a (previously) installed HID (Human Interface Device). This could be a mouse, a keyboard, but most likely a drawing tablet such as this one:



alt text



When a such a driver fails to install (correctly), the "There is a problem with your tablet driver. Please reboot your system. If the problem persists reinstall or update the driver." will show up when opening a program that loads tablet drivers. (Such as graphic design programs as Photoshop, GIMP, etc.)



To correct this problem, the driver needs to be uninstalled. Click right on My Computer -> Manage, Computer Management pops up -> Device Manager.




Check for irregularities/errors in:




  • Human Interface Devices (Most likely)

  • Mice and other pointing devices (Second most likely)

  • Keyboards



Uninstall the (currupted) tablet driver.




UPDATE



Try booting into safe mode and remove the drivers again, before rebooting, rename C:\WINDOWS\system32\DRIVERS\WacomVKHid.sys to WacomVKHid.sys.backup. Then try and reboot.


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