In the past couple months, my A-300 Pro drivers got uninstalled, and not sure what caused this. To add to this conundrum, I had one program that was taking about a minute to launch and found out after about a week that the NVIDIA display driver was "not installed" when I ran that installation again.
 
The only thing that comes to mind is I did do a pair of image restorations of my C: drive, but not sure why/how this would have caused the drivers to be "not present" in either case.
 
Has anyone experienced this or know the cause?

Were the drivers there at the time you made the image?

W10 major updates can sometimes hose drivers, especially older ones that have been "forced" to work with it (my PRC-800 comes to mind).

After the anniversary update i had to re-install it. Also my Focusrite, which normally has great drivers.

HTH,
Jerry

I forgot to put into the OP that this is Win7 64. The video driver may have been updated following the restoration of the image, which could potentially explain the A300 driver, but not overly convinced. NVIDIA's installer has a habit of restoring audio drivers to what it sees fit, but I had the video driver installed (even if older) when the image was done. When I ran the installer again, after it does it's system check it said "No driver installed" for Current Display Driver.
 
The oddest occurence is I have a simple "list.txt" file on the C: drive which I use for exclusions when doing data backups with xcopy. That file excludes the folders which have directory junctions to others drives. The last data backup I performed revealed the list.txt file had spontaneously disappeared. This is making me start to think I either have a UAC issue, virus (can't find anything), or Iobit's Advanced System Care is suddenly doing something weird (used for 4+ years without any issues, but a new version was just released). MalwareBytes Anti-Malware suddenly decided to also quarantine Advanced System Care, so this may be the actual issue.
 
I also have not ruled out degradation of the primary SSD which is pushing 6 years old now. I have debated replacing that, but given this weird situation I am leaning heavily toward a clean install of things on a new SSD rather than restoring an image to it.
 
 

Quick follow up to this... I was talking to a friend at work about the list.txt file, and he agreed that was probably a UAC issue, but the drivers left him baffled.
 
On a hunch (because of the MIDI device limitation), I checked hidden devices and was floored at how many duplicate devices this machine had (50+ in total across all areas). I had to painstakingly delete them one by one (all that were greyed out) and everything seems snappier now. All-in-all, some things had been duplicated 4 times over.
 
Since this bothered me, I checked my Win10 machine at work and that had about 25 duplicates too.
 
They will return as things are connected, but the duplicates in "shadow copies" and "storage volumes" I found rather odd on both machines.
 
In case anyone is interested, this link is a good site to check for unused drivers. In addition to the above, the ones in "Human Interface Devices" and "USB controllers" are the ones to check. Shadowed items are installed devices not in use.