Hardware really strange issue with Saitek X45 stick

[shadowfax]

Orbiter 2016, vanilla except for the XR fleet and XR sound addons, Windows 10, Saitek X45.

Everything worked fine under the default Windows joystick driver, but I decided I wanted to program buttons to keypresses, so I installed the Saitek driver/software. I went through the calibration process, and the calibration properties window shows that calibration is correct.

But within Orbiter, when the stick is neutral the space plane behaves as though I'm inputting full right stick, which of course makes me roll over and crash on takeoff. I tested in FSX and the plane behaves as it should, so the problem is specific to Orbiter.

But here's the really weird part. If I go to an external view with the stick neutral, the right elevon is up and the left elevon is down. If I push the stick all the way to the left, the left elevon goes up, and the right elevon stays up.

Even stranger, if I press fire button B (up and to the right of the lower hat switch on the stick), then the right elevon goes down slightly, but not to neutral.

I know the mode switches on the X45 can do strange things in flight sims since they basically spam a button press repeatedly, but moving them to different positions does not change the behavior at all. None of the other buttons on the stick has any effect on the control surfaces.

Anyone have any clue what might be going on here?

 

[dbeachy1]

You could try running Joy2Key to map joystick buttons to keystrokes -- then you wouldn't need to run the Saitek software to do it.

 

[shadowfax]

Hey, thanks for the fast reply.

The trouble with that is that the Saitek driver is already installed, and Windows 10 isn't letting me uninstall it - I'll uninstall it and then as soon as I reboot it detects the stick and re-installs the Saitek driver. This is one of the reasons I'm annoyed with Windows 10.

 

[dbeachy1]

What if when you uninstall the driver you click the checkbox that says, "Delete driver files"? Then it should not reinstall the drivers.

 

[shadowfax]

I've tried that. It then re-installs the Saitek drivers as soon as I reboot or re-plug the stick. And the drivers are locked away in the Driver Store. I spent several hours trying to delete all traces of them including from the registry, but there's a file somewhere that keeps replacing them whenever I plug the stick in. I have yet to find that file.

I'd say it's acting like a virus, but I think it's more that the drivers are really meant for Win7, and so the installer isn't behaving properly under win10.