Widcomm Uninstalltion wipes out the computer. New Virus or Windows Voulnerability.

I cannot believe this... It happened to me yesterday. Not only are the Dell versions of the WIDCOMM drivers generally old and iffy, but any attempt to rectify these problems in [what we all would naturally assume to be] a normal way results in an attempt to wipe your drive. I suppose I am relatively lucky -- I killed the "uninstall" before it "completed" and was able to restore 95% of my files. I have an old backup in a safe that is fairly recent as well, but unfortunately I am on the road trying to work while dealing with this -- and there is no other word for it -- c r a p. ("c r a p" being the absolute nicest way I can describe it now. Had I written this yesterday when I was dealing with the problem, I would likely have used much more colorful words.

I have lost some recent work and personal files that were not on my backup at home and that did not make it out of the Windows 7 Ultimate (64-bit) volume restore in time. I cannot blame Windows for this (a statement I've never uttered before) and I believe the blame lies directly at the feet of Broadcom and (to a lesser extent) Dell. My system is a Dell 6520 lappy, but I believe Dell just use what Broadcom gives them after performing some basic tests with it. Between this post (and others like it) and what have certainly been *many* tech support calls by others, there are no longer any plausible excuses that these vendors could possibly offer.

I intend to make every effort to notify Dell and ask them why they have not made any attempts (at least that I could find) to solve the problem in concert with Broadcom. Further, I intend to contact Broadcom and ask how this could ever have come to pass. It is not out of the question that I may engage legal representation if Broadcom does not address my grievance(s) in a manner I find completely fitting and acceptable. I will be sure to pass on any resolution, activity, and/or progress which may be of note to others in this thread.

V/R,

attriti0n

I also faced the same issue.... Tried fixing WIDCOM BT driver from Acer Manager of my Acer Aspire 4820T laptop.. It started uninstalling old driver.. took long time and then suddenly there was bombardment of popup windows (hundreds) with message "cold not find/read file". I tried closing these quickly but failed and then resorted to re-starting the Window 7. On start if gave the message "a problem was detected with firmware SW and normally its fixed by Firmware software install".. when window restarted I found that all desktop icons, startup program list etc wiped out. HDD was showing almost full space avaibale.  I suspected that it was due to some malware/virus activity which incidentally trigerred at the same time when I was upgrading BT driver and did not suspected it. I tried to do Windows system restore to an earlier date but it failed at last stating that unable to read some files and recommended to disable/uninstall antivirus software running. I removed Avira AV and then again redtored the system to 7 days back date and it was successful. I found all the programs in startup list and most of the destop icons. On checking the opening the programs I found that none were working for want of essential files which obviously were removed by WIDCOMM unintall program.

then I googled the net and found that Recuva is the utility to be used to recover deleted files. I downloaded and it was able to recover substantial amount of docs, images etc. The program runs pretty fast and amazing. I was sure that this whole wiping act was of some malware and wanted to get the real cause of the issue. I found http://malwaretips.com/blogs/file-recovery-virus/ useful and downloaded all the tools and did a thorough system check pnly to conclude that there was no malware.

 It is then, when I found this forum which cleared the doubt.  Its really very pathitic to learn that Giants like Acer, DELL, Sony are using a cmponent with known software issue causing havoc to the precisous data of hundreds of users across globe and its still unresolved even after more than an year. Whether somebody has sued them till date?

Yeah...I can't believe this is still an issue.....

The fix for me (as scary as it sounded) was to uninstall from CONTROL PANEL (add/remove programs) and then install from scratch.  This worked fine for me although I did a full backup before I started.

The updated drivers solved many problems for me.  But, the cost was initially very high (like, a 'cleaned' hard drive....)

This. it's 2012 and I've just recovered from the disaster of WIdcomm driver wiped my whole c: drive.

BEWARE.

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