Prevent Windows 10 from installing OneNote printer

OneNote printer is a nightmare for me. I removed it from Printers countless of times. It always comes back. Sometimes as a default printer, sometimes as a regular one. How can I get rid of it once and for good?

I have only found this seven years old answer, but it is for Office 2013 and Windows 7. I have Windows 10 and Office 365. I have opened GPO, but all the entries and menu items are completely different than in given answer.

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After looking at your skill level @trejder , I rewrote this post.

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First, the simple worry free way. I am not sure how long these changes will last. Perhaps permanent?

1. Open your device manager
2. Open "Print queues"
3. One at a time, right click the OneNote entries and choose "Uninstall device"

Now, the "driver guy" way:

WARNING, don't be careless. You are playing with drivers

First, I am going to give a brief primer on how this all works.

• A driver author writes an inf to install their goodies. In this specific case, The OneNote installer installs a "print queue" driverish thingy from C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\root\Office16\OneNote\prnms006.inf
• Windows copies this inf to c:\windows\inf and renames it with a name that starts with oem and ends with a unique number like oem25.inf.
• There are also built in drivers that don't have unique inf files but are still part of your driver tree. (as you will see below). An instance of this might be something like a keyboard or usb flash drive.
• We are going to use the pnputil command to make this all go away. First, we are going to use it to get a list of what is installed, then we will use it to clobber those entries.

Lets get started cleaning house! :)

You can assume that ALL of these commands are from an elevated command prompt.

1. Go to C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\root\Office16 and rename OneNote to _OneNote_ (its just the driver, not the app). This is to prevent office from kicking off the install again in the future and making a NEW oemXXX.inf. Of course an upgrade will put it back. :(
2. Run pnputil /enum-drivers >%temp%\oem_drivers.txt
3. Run pnputil /enum-devices >%temp%\drivers.txt
4. Open %temp%\oem_drivers.txt in your handy dandy text editor and search for prnms006.inf. Note the name of the oemXX.inf file that it is coupled with.
5. Open %temp%\drivers.txt and search for OneNote. Note the all Instance ID strings.

NOW ITS CLOBBERIN' TIME!!

1. run pnputil /delete-driver /uninstall oemXXX.inf where (of course) oemXXX.inf is the one you took down.
2. run pnputil /delete-driver oemXXX.inf /force where (of course) oemXXX.inf is the one you took down. This might give an error but we do it becuase I have had the first one fail to actually delete the driver package.
3. run pnputil /remove-device INSTANCE_ID_STRING_HERE for each OneNote Instance ID found in drivers.txt

You should be clean.
You should not require a reboot for this kind of driver.

This technique will for to force uninstall ANY kind of OEM driver (like realtek or HP thingamajiggers too!).

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