E6400: Enabling Biometric Devices Control Panel by installing WBF fingerprint driver

I just went through this so I am sharing it with all of you. It seems that Dell is not yet officially supporting the native fingerprint management in Windows 7 on the E6400, so if you go into Control Panel the Biometric Devices panel is missing.

The Biometric Devices panel will not show unless there is a device with a driver that is using the Windows Biometric Framework (WBF). Even with the latest E6400 security and Control Point drivers there appears to be no WBF compatibility. Scouring the web I've noticed that other Dell models have WBF compatible drivers, including the E6410 and E6500. I found the driver for Windows 7 32-bit systems and have installed it on my E6400. Click here for the driver page.

Code:

SHA1 hash:
7df9c4adcd0a9680211a5b348df7ada8e108f838 CV_WBF_Setup_2690H_32bit_ZPE.exe

The exact steps I took (with lots of reboots required):

Uninstalled all Dell ControlPoint stuff:
Goto Control Panel and uninstall or do it manually by opening each install file and choosing uninstall:
Dell_ControlPoint-Security-D_A12_R230283.exe
Drivers - Dell_ControlPoint-Security-D_A18_R269802.exe
Diagnostic - Dell_ControlVault_A00_R270677.exe

Reinstalled:
Drivers - Dell_ControlPoint-Security-D_A18_R269802.exe

Unzip CV_WBF_Setup_2690H_32bit_ZPE.exe
goto "Dell ControlVault WBF Firmware" directory
run ushupgrade.exe
If control point driver not found then 269802 fingerprint driver wasn't reinstalled.
If TPM isn't available then one of your uninstalls disabled it so you'll have to go to the BIOS and re-enable TPM.

CV_WBF_Setup_2690H_32bit_ZPE.exe
goto "Dell ControlVault WBF Driver" directory
The install failed to install some credential services the first time. I just hit ignore. Following a reboot after install completed I ran the msi again and chose repair. Now the credential services show as enabled

Warning: My steps above are different from Dell's. Dell says or its programs will tell you to undo the TPM, uninstall everything Control Point, including 269802, then install the WBF driver first before doing the firmware upgrade. This may or may not work I just didn't do it that way. You should try Dell's instructions first.

At this boot I still have the UAPP white BIOS screen asking me to scan my fingerprint on boot (what I wanted) but after booting there is no fingerprint login to Windows. The fingerprint biometric device was then accessible and available in Biometric Devices in Control Panel and I had to rescan all my fingers.

Exactly how I access or manage my preboot fingerprints at this point I don't know.


Why I did all this:
Dell's Control Point security suite has caused me a lot of problems. I'm think most of the problems I had stemmed from the Credential Provider (ICredentialProvider) class that Wave systems uses to hook the winlogon. It is wvcredprov.dll in %systemroot% . Sometimes when my computer would come out of sleep the winlogon would be frozen. The fingerprint reader would not work. It would say either "connecting" or "swipe finger" or "fail", and in any case nothing would happen. I could enter my credentials and press the button and nothing would happen, or the login screen would be blank.

I tried all sorts of things to fix the issue but nothing worked, including:
Disable USB selective suspend
Microsoft's USB troubleshooting HCReset registry entry
Attaching Tasks to events and then invoking devcon in those tasks to restart or remove/rescan the controller and/or hub and/or fingerprint device. This actually helped sometimes but it wasn't reliable. When it would fail I'd usually see in the logs that the device could not be removed and a reboot was required.
Installing UPEK/ActionTec drivers (not sure why I did this, it didn't really do anything).


Now I have two fingerprint devices listed. I should probably only have one.

Code:

devcon find "@USB\VID_0A5C&PID_5801*"

USB\VID_0A5C&PID_5801\0123456789ABCD                        : USB Composite Device
USB\VID_0A5C&PID_5801&MI_00\6&1EB0F4E8&4&0000               : Dell ControlVault w/ Fingerprint Swipe Sensor
USB\VID_0A5C&PID_5801&MI_01\6&1EB0F4E8&4&0001               : Broadcom Usbccid Smartcard Reader (WUDF)
USB\VID_0A5C&PID_5801&MI_03\6&1EB0F4E8&4&0003               : Control Vault w/ Fingerprint Swipe Sensor
4 matching device(s) found.

Windows works now for fingerprint logins and I put my computer into sleep/resume a few dozen times yesterday without any problems like I had before. There is no single-sign on anymore but what I did to remedy that is since I'm the only user of the computer and fingerprints have to unlock the boot process I used Sysinternals' Autologon and added my credentials. This way after scanning my fingerprint at the white screen Windows 7 starts up and logs me in automatically.

If you know more about this than I do or have any advice please share it with everyone here.

 

Thank you, I was getting really frustrated with the crummy Wave login system and its glitches. I will have to try this out.

Has anyone tried WBF on Windows 8?