Removed bluetooth device keeps re-appearing

A few weeks ago I started encountering a weird issue. After attempting to re-connect my bluetooth headsets to my laptop, no connection would be established. No worries, I thought, just remove the bluetooth connection and reconnect. So I hard-reset my bluetooth headset and removed the device from my laptop's "Bluetooth & Other Devices".

This time, however, my laptop would not find my bluetooth headset again. I thought perhaps the headset was broken, but no, I could connect it perfectly well to my phone or a different computer via Bluetooth. It's only my laptop which does not seem to find the headset. To make things even weirder, the headset kept re-appearing in the list under "Other Devices", only offering the option to remove it once more without offering the option of re-connecting.

To make things stranger still, once I delete the headphones' driver in the device manager, the driver keeps re-appearing whenever I "Scan for hardware changes", and so does the listing under "Other Devices" in the Bluetooth menu.

My layman's diagnosis: something messed up in the communication between my headphones and my laptop, and I cannot reset and re-establish a new bluetooth connection because my laptop somehow "remembers" the headphones, even though it shouldn't, as if my deletion/removal were incomplete. Do you have any recommendations on how I can wipe the headphones from the laptop's memory for good, so that I can hopefully connect the two devices fresh again some day?

1 Answer

After googling some more, I have found the answer in a different forum post, which I will reproduce here for the sake of any other user encountering the same issue:

wouldn't normally necro a thread but i spent two weeks trawling the internet trying to sort this out and this thread is pretty high up on the search rankings, hopefully can help someone.

My symptoms:

• Previously working bluetooth speaker (UE BOOM 2 in my case) stops connecting
• Windows 10 'Bluetooth and other devices' menu shows the device as Paired
• Pressing connect makes it attempt to connect but fails then it goes back to Paired
• Remove device hides the device from the menu, but as soon as you turn bluetooth on and off, or restart the computer, the device comes back
• You pull your hair out.

Solution that worked for me after much, much unsuccessful internet trawling and one system restore:

• Download this 7 year old command line bluetooth toolset: Bluetooth command line tools - work with bluetooth from the command line
• Install it, make sure you enable the option to "Add Bluetooth Command Line Tools directory to path"
• Open Powershell
• Put your device that isn't working properly into pairing mode WARNING: THE FOLLOWING COMMAND WILL UNPAIR ALL BLUETOOTH DEVICES
• type in "btpair -u"
• Boom, all of a sudden Windows asks me if I want to allow pairing to my device that isn't working
• Hit yes, successfully connected again
• Cry tears of joy

God I hope that helps someone else.

This worked perfectly for me!