So I put a 3080 in my Win 7 PC...

[Shaq]

and installed the latest 473.81 drivers and was having an issue in a game so I wanted to go to an earlier driver. The result is any Nvidia driver earlier than this now refuses to install. I used DDU to clean out the old driver and anything older than the latest won't install, but I can install the latest driver! Did the drivers write something to my registry that DDU can't clean so I can't downgrade my drivers for a security purpose or other reason? I may try to do a system restore to several days ago and see if it will fix it, but I was wondering if ay of you had heard of this before?

 

[Shaq]

The error I get is that the OS is not recognized and no graphics adapter has been found.

 

[xrobwx71]

473.81 is a security update.
From Nvidia:
GeForce Security Update Driver
NVIDIA has released a software security update display driver for GeForce GPUs to be used with Windows 7/8.x which is no longer supported by Game Ready Drivers. Effective October 2021, Game Ready Driver upgrades, including performance enhancements, new features, and bug fixes, are exclusively available for systems utilizing Windows 10 and Windows 11 as their operating system. Critical security updates will be available on systems utilizing Windows 7 through September 2024.

Did you run DDU in safe mode?

Utilizing DDU Display Driver Uninstaller Properly