New WPD driver shows up all of a sudden on Windows PCs

Mar 9, 2017 13:04 GMT  ·  By

Weird things are being noticed by Windows users who keep an eye on Windows Update these days, as Microsoft has just shipped an unnamed Windows driver update only a few hours after the company re-released two telemetry patches for Windows systems.

This time, however, the mysterious update fails to install altogether on some computers, and that could in the end turn out to be quite a good thing since there are no details regarding its purpose.

The new update lands on Windows with the following label Microsoft - WPD - 2/22/2016 12:00:00 AM - 5.2.5326.4762 and appears to be a Microsoft Windows Portable Device driver update whose purpose is yet to be determined.

While some people seem to believe that it’s specifically aimed at Windows 10 Mobile devices, so its goal might be to help set up phones to be accessed on Windows 10 PCs, no confirmation in this regard has been provided. And in some cases, the update fails to install with error 0x800f0217, which is not yet documented, but which was first spotted in 2016.

Windows 10 Mobile device drivers?

A description of the drivers that Microsoft provides for Windows Portable Devices (WPD) seems to indeed indicate that the new update is aimed at Windows 10 Mobile phones.

“Microsoft provides several drivers for standard protocols and devices, including Picture Transfer Protocol (PTP), Media Transfer Protocol (MTP) devices, and Mass Storage Class (MSC) devices,” the firm says, and this description seems to suggest that installing this driver pack helps configure Windows phones on Windows 10 devices.

For the moment, there’s no confirmation or statement from Microsoft regarding this mysterious update, but we’ve reached out to the company to ask for more information and we’ll update the article as soon as an answer is provided.

In the meantime, however, if the update fails to install on your system, it’s better to simply hide it until a fix is provided. Otherwise, it seems to be impossible to diagnose the aforementioned error code for the time being.