A few days ago I installed Direct3D updates for DirectX 9.0c (required by a game) on one laptop computer with Windows XP SP2.
I was pretty scared, because after installing these updates any fullscreen Direct3D application (e.g. most games) crashed notebook's video driver in a few seconds (sometimes with a bluescreen, but more often with Windows - Display Driver Stopped Responding error message). As far as I know Microsoft doesn't provide users with any opportunity to uninstall DirectX (and it's updates). There are some third party DirectX removal tools, but I wasn't willing to risk to use them, so I made an experiment on virtual machine.
It was a nice surprise, that Direct3D updates (at least those I had installed) don't replace any files, neither they create any noticeable registry entries. So I simply deleted Direct3D update files from the laptop by invoking ren %SystemRoot%\system32\d3dx9_*.dll *.dll.bak in Command Prompt. After deleting these files Direct3D started again to work normally.
I assume that similar methods may be used to remove updates for other DirectX components as well.

Posted on 2007.10.21. 15:28
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