Well, now it's been 7 years. SEVEN. And now NvTray.exe no longer exists, and is instead seemingly integrated into the kernel-mode driver itself. I have an EVGA NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 3GB. Now how, at this juncture, can I disable the systray icon popping up upon every boot, even with the option in the CPL itself being unchecked? I literally need to right-click the systray icon and click Exit every single time I reboot, which is mildly infuriating. I have clean installed the latest Game Ready Driver under Custom, and installed only the Display Driver and HD Audio Driver, and the godforsaken thing STILL pops up upon reboot. What fix is there now? Now, don't tell me there is no fix other than 'downgrading' my NVIDIA software, as this has been a thing since the release of my specific GPU; there is no older version without this 'feature'!
Edit: Okay, I tried reinstalling the same way again in case I messed up and misclicked before, and now installation of the driver is failing altogether, merely saying 'Failed' next to Display Driver, and 'Not Installed' next to HD Audio Driver... Now I cannot install the driver whatsoever.
Edit 2: Apparently this error is widespread with 536.99, so I'm installing 536.67 instead. Hopefully this one works, because if not, I'm going to need some serious help.
Edit 3: So apparently Windows decided to reuse the old driver data the first time I installed the latest version, despite setting it to use a clean install. I forcefully removed the offending drivers, and now we're getting some progress. Hopefully this'll disable the popup in the systray this time...
Edit 4: Alright, so apparently that did nothing. 536.67 also says 'NVIDIA Installer Failed', so I cannot install it, either. Guess I'm trying an even OLDER version, although I really don't want to.
Edit 5: Okay, I enabled full installer logging, and apparently I need to run the installer as Admin. :facepalm:
flq: CopyFile: 'C:\WINDOWS\system32\nvcpl.dll' to 'C:\WINDOWS\Temp\OLD9F07.tmp' FAILED
! flq: Error 5: Access is denied.
!!! bak: Failed to copy 'C:\WINDOWS\system32\nvcpl.dll' to 'C:\WINDOWS\Temp\OLD9F07.tmp'. Error = 0x00000005
!!! flq: Failed to commit copy queue. Error = 0x00000005
Edit 6: So, I finally got it working. Had to temporarily take ownership of C:\Windows\System32\DriverStore\ and all its contents, add myself with Full Control, then manually delete ALL NVIDIA-related driver stuff from the folder, then change the owner back to SYSTEM. After that, it installed perfectly.
Now, the moment of truth. I unchecked both options in NVIDIA Control Panel. Will the icon pop up after a reboot? I'm very nervous. Well, here goes. I'll do a final edit with my results.
FINAL EDIT: Now it works, and no more pesky tray icon! I originally had the Windows Update version. So, it appears that even after removing the drivers via Device Manager, my PC kept a stale copy of the Display Driver DLLs in DriverStore under 'nvmdig.inf_<guid>, which contained the Control Panel DLL. This was being reused by the NVIDIA installer as apparently the DLLs haven't been updated in 6 months, and my version from Windows Update is 5 months old. This was causing a conflict after uninstall of the drivers from the NVIDIA website, because NVIDIA's installer chose not to remove these 'stale' drivers when uninstalling, but told my PC's registry that they were deleted, so even a clean install failed since it thought those files were 'cleaned' already.
All in all, a very frustrating ordeal. I now have automatic driver downloads disabled on my PC, and I plan to keep it that way.
post edited by Maq47 - 2023/08/08 21:56:41