Cleaning the Windows Driver Store

Starting with Windows Vista, the driver store is a trusted collection of inbox and third-party driver packages. The operating system maintains this collection in a secure location on the local hard disk. Only the driver packages in the driver store can be installed for a device.

When a driver package is copied to the driver store, all of its files are copied. This includes the INF file and all files that are referenced by the INF file. All files that are in the driver package are considered critical to the device installation. The INF file must reference all of the required files for device installation so that they are present in the driver store. If the INF file references a file that is not included in the driver package, the driver package is not copied to the store.

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Nvidia, ATI and Intel driver packages can be a few hundred megabytes big as they are typically "unified" driver packages supporting a whole range of different devices. Additionally they release updates very often. As each driver is installed the driver store can grow to become quite large in size.

1 way to clean them is a laborious command line method which I won't talk about.

A much easier way is using this program http://driverstoreexplorer.codeplex.com/
It must be ran as Administrator to work properly.