How to remove "Disabled Software" from MacOS System Report when a provided uninstall tool does not work?

Is there a way to manually remove an item from the Disabled Software list or mark it as enabled when the version and date disabled are both listed as unknown?

The example below describes a situation where this happened. I am looking for a general approach to removing "Disabled Software" from the macOS System Report when a provided uninstall tool does not work. While this example references DisplayLink Driver, my goal is to solve this problem when other drivers produce this problem too.

For those who work for or with DisplayLink and have suggested DisplayLink-specific approaches (i.e. manually delete specific files and use the uninstall tool), I appreciate your suggestions. However, the provided solutions did not work for this scenario. I have also tried manually installing the driver using kext commands without success.

Solution 1:

The safest way is to use our uninstaller. If you have partially uninstalled you'll have to run a complete installation before uninstalling. The uninstaller is in the /Applications/DisplayLink folder.

Depending on your upgrade history you may have slightly different files but if you really want to uninstall manually -again not recommending that- here is the list of files: OSX 10.10.x:

• /Library/Extensions/DisplayLinkDriver.kext
• /Library/Extensions/DisplayLinkEthernetDriver.kext
• /Library/LaunchAgents/com.displaylink.useragent.plist
• /Library/LaunchAgents/com.displaylink.useragent-prelogin.plist
• /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.displaylink.launchd.plist
• /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.displaylink.displaylinkmanager.plist
• /Applications/DisplayLink/DisplayLink Software Uninstaller.app
• /Library/Application Support/DisplayLink
• /Library/PrivilegedHelperTools/DisplayLink
• /var/db/receipts/com.displaylink*

Administrator access is required.

On 10.8 the kext files are in /System/Library:

• /System/Library/Extensions/DisplayLinkDriver.kext
• /System/Library/Extensions/DisplayLinkEthernetDriver.kext

From: https://www.displaylink.org/forum/showthread.php?p=76864

Solution 2:

I have managed to get it working again. Here are the steps I had to go to:

1. Uninstall the DisplayLink drivers and restart the system.
2. Right after restarting the system, reinstall the drivers. Don't restart again yet.
3. Open System Preferences -> Security and Privacy. If you did that right after reinstalling the drivers, you should see a message saying that an extension was blocked. You should know what to do now.

The message on step 3 only was displayed to me immediately after starting the system.