Remove Vista/W7 hardwareprofiles
For whatever reason Microsoft removed the accessible way of removing hardware profiles in Vista and Windows 7. To help out a collegue with a corrupt profile I made a tiny Powershell script to perform this action. It’s easily done by hand in the registry, the downside is you won’t see the profile descriptions which is a tad errorprone. Also, feel free to use this but I will take no responsibility whatsoever if you use this and you break your Windows install 
# 20091218 – vo.o1 – PZO – Initial hack to delete hardware profiles in Windows Vista/7
#
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# Let’s see which profiles exist..
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$i = 0
Write-Host “”
Write-Host “The following hardware profiles have been found on this computer:” -f white
foreach ($profile in (ls -path “HKLM:\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\IDConfigDB\Hardware Profiles\”) ) {
Write-Host 000$i – (get-itemproperty -path “HKLM:\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\IDConfigDB\Hardware Profiles\000$i”).FriendlyName
$i++
}
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# Now we can ask which to remove..
#————————————————————————————————————————————–
Write-Host “”
Write-Host “You are strongly advised not to remove profile 0000 – New Hardware Profile” -f red
Write-Host “”
$input = read-host “Which profile is causing you headaches and should be removed?”
Write-Host “deleting.. “HKLM:\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Hardware Profiles\$input”"
Remove-Item -Path “HKLM:\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Hardware Profiles\$input”
Finally: do _not_ remove profile 0000 unless you know what you are doing. YMMV!
[BBG]
