That’s not a bug. That’s archaeology.
Open setupapi.dev.log in the INF folder (it can be hundreds of megabytes). It is a forensic ledger of every driver installation, failure, and rollback. You’ll see lines like: where are windows 10 drivers stored
And like any deep archive, it accumulates dead versions. After five years of updates, a Windows 10 machine will hold drivers for printers you threw away in 2021, GPUs you sold in 2022, and webcams from a laptop that died in 2023. They sit in the DriverStore, signed, validated, and utterly inert—until the PnP manager, for reasons known only to Microsoft, decides one day that your mouse needs to roll back to a 2019 driver. That’s not a bug
Inside DriverStore\FileRepository , you’ll find folders with names like nv_dispig.inf_amd64_3f4e5d6c7a8b9c0d . Microsoft’s naming is a work of baroque horror: the INF file name, followed by a cryptographic hash of its contents and the architecture. This prevents collisions. Two different versions of the same driver from 2019 and 2024 can coexist peacefully. It is a forensic ledger of every driver
Here, ImagePath points exactly to the .sys file in System32\drivers . Start dictates boot order (0 = boot driver, 1 = system driver, 2 = auto-load, 3 = on-demand). This registry key is the driver's birth certificate and tombstone. Asking "where are Windows 10 drivers stored" is like asking "where is a novel stored." The answer is: in the author's drafts (DriverStore\FileRepository), in the printed book (System32\drivers), in the library catalog (INF files), and in the reader's memory (registry).