Empty Win7 Devices and Printers window

All in all, I have been pretty happy with Windows 7, but then again, I had no problems with Vista either (once I disabled User Account Control, UAC, which is responsible for all the nagging permission popups).

Yesterday, however, I went to stop a USB drive with the system tray icon and nothing was listed there. I then opened up Devices and Printers and it, too, was completely blank. That was pretty weird given that all my printers still showed up in the selection list when I actually printed something.

A little searching on the internet turned up two possible sources for the problem. The first is that the bluetooth service was not running. A couple of weeks ago I had been experimenting with a bluetooth dongle, so I figured that was possibility. I opened up Services and, sure enough, the bluetooth service was not running. I started it up, and reset the property to Automatic instead of manual. Unfortunately, it did not make any difference to my Devices and Printers window.

The second suggestion was to re-register all the IE8 dll's, and provided a link to a batch file to do so. After downloading and running the CMD file, all my devices re-appeared.