Vista New Hardware Wizard

Vista Home Premium SP1 - I'll try to keep this short (not likely :-o ). I have an HP laptop here that I installed a clean Vista OS on about a month ago. I installed all the drivers and everything was working great. The owner of the PC took it upon himself to contact HP for a factory restore disc and he dumped the install I had previously done and used the factory disc. His reasoning was that he "wanted the newest drivers and updates". Hmmm... I had just done that. Whatever. So upon finalizing the factory restore, something is askew in the sound drivers. It constantly pops up a message that "a device has been plugged into the headphone port" or that "a device has been unplugged from the headphone port". It never did this with the install I originally did. So now the laptop is detecting 'phantom' headphones being plugged/unplugged at random up to 10 times per minute (!!!!!). Obviously, this makes the internal speakers not work when the phantom is plugged in. So I tried to uninstall/reinstall the drivers with the actual newest drivers (the factory disc had v1.6 for the Realtek HD drivers, the newest version available is 2.27!!!). But Vista tries to reload the driver immediately after I uninstall it, and it forces the old driver to install even though it was uninstalled from Add/Remove Programs. How can I disable the New Hardware Wizard so I can uninstall the driver and reinstall it w/o Vista taking over and installing its own driver?

On another point- I removed the dude's hard drive and popped in my own HD and did a fresh Vista install on it just to see if there was a possible hardware issue causing the phantom headphones to appear/disappear/reappear; like maybe there was something stuck in the headphone jack, it's clean, and the clean Vista install confirmed my suspicions: the hardware is fine, the sound works fine, and the problem is with the install performed using the factory disc.

Other than disabling the New Hardware Wizard or the auto-driver-install, does anyone have any thoughts? Ideas? Suggestions?
:-D

[dlb]

("keep it short"? I think not!!! LOL )

 

Oh yeah... one other thing.... after using the factory restore disc, he started complaining that the system was running slower than it should and was trying to make it my fault. (????) As we all know, factory restore discs install a whole grip of other useless garbage that weighs down the system and hogs resources (with Norton being the prime culprit in this particular scenario), so he was comparing this now bloated Vista install to the lean-mean-clean Vista that I had originally performed.....
:banghead

(this doesn't really have any bearing on anything, I just felt like sharing LOL )

 

Oh yeah... he's definitely paying. There's no warranty on software anyway unless it's something I did wrong or something I overlooked, and this doesn't happen very often at all. I simply cannot warranty what a user does (or doesn't do) to their OS.

I guess I'll boot into safe mode and see if I can disable the PnP service....

 

:cry :banghead I spoke too soon!!!! It seems the sound works perfect when running with the 'generic' Vista high definition audio drivers, but as soon as the RealTek drivers are installed, the 'phantom headphones' jump back in. This happens with both the install from the restore CD and the 'lean' install of just Vista and the drivers. Yes, I installed the chipset drivers first as always. The fact that this weirdness occurs on a fresh clean OS install leads me to believe that something is wrong with the way the hardware communicates with the RealTek driver, but the fact that the generic Vista driver works flawlessly is really odd..... I have done some research and it seems that MANY people have had audio problems with the HP dv6000 series laptops.... :cry