Here’s all you have to do to stop automatic driver installs provided you are running Win10/or Win11 Pro (Home uses a different method):
Read the section How to stop drivers installation from Group Policy
And it’s as simple as that. One setting only. Takes maybe ten seconds to set. It’s permanent and so long as you upgrade your Windows 10/11* Pro builds the setting sticks in perpetuity, and you’ll never have to set it again. You’re done.
(Don’t listen to anyone who says you have to format c:\ and do a CLEAN Install to undo a driver overwrite–no, no, no! Very poor advice. If you have an overwritten GPU driver, for instance, you can easily correct it by downloading your preferred driver direct from your GPU maker (AMD or nVidia or Intel) and simply reinstall the driver you want, and the overwritten driver is instantly replaced by the correct driver. Then, to make it permanent, follow the simple and easy instructions above to abolish automatic driver rewrites permanently, so long as you do not do a Clean install. If you do, for some reason, then just reset the Group Policy setting as described above.
I’ve got ~12 TBs of installed data, games and programs, about 14 separate partitions for organization purposes, and if I do a CLEAN install it will take me a week or more to reinstall everything…
I suppose it’s been close to a decade since my last clean install, and I hope to never have to do another one. Also, several years ago when I upgraded win 10 Pro to Win11 Pro, I had the Group Policy setting in Win10 already in & it carried forward into my upgrade of Win11.)
*Win10 Pro might have a slightly different setting in group policy than Win11 does, I cannot remember, but the setting does the same thing in Win10 and Win11 Pro.