Please make a comical picture where Clippy the Paperclip, the well-known office assistant, is taking the webcam away from a workstation in the office. He looks mischievous and almost evil. The office workers look sad.

Adventures in the Windows 11 24H2-land: How to restore your webcam after February 2025 Patch breaks it?

4 min read.

This article explains how to get your built-in webcam back after a Windows 11 update (in my case, February 2025 Cumulative Update package) hides/disables it.

The weird thing is, the camera is visible in the Device Manager. No app can see it though. And trying to update the driver through Device Manager is no use, as it’s apparently already using the latest driver version.

Background

I can appreciate Windows removing any extraneous web cameras I might have – or rather, might’ve had.

See, if I don’t have a webcam, I won’t be able to turn on my camera for the online meetings – and boy is that a relief! No need to worry about looking good if you don’t even HAVE a camera, right?

It’s not every day you get to tell your colleagues, friends and family, that Windows is working wonders on improving your mental health. Quite frankly, in the past 2 years it’s rather been the opposite!

Anyway. I actually use the webcam occasionally – not in the meetings, of course (I have an external webcam for that), but when signing in.

See, I’ve been a devoted if relatively unsuccessful user of Windows Hello for about a year now. The experience of arriving back to your workstation, and then flinging your head around for a while trying to figure out which camera Windows decided to use now, and then seeing it fail and enter a PIN instead has been a key part of my workday experience for the past months.

And that workflow is completely broken, if I only have one camera! It’s like I’m spinning my head around in vain then.

Jokes aside, I also occasionally use my laptop without having it hooked into the dock, and then the built-in webcam is very helpful. And this is mainly the reason why I don’t appreciate Microsoft removing it without even asking me.

Problem

So after that little rant, let’s recap the problem.

My Dell XPS 14 9440 – a 12-month-old AI-laptop – got Windows 24H2 shoved down its throat (which required a system reinstall to get the laptop to start again, and only about 2 weeks later it got the Windows 11 February 2025 patch that then broke the webcam.

No apps would see my built-in webcam, even though it was visible in the Device Manager:

Windows was also convinced the device is working as expected:

I could use my external webcam for most of my use cases, but I still need the built-in webcam to work when I’m web conferencing or using Windows Hello when I’m not hooked into a dock.

So I needed to find a fix.

Reason

This is something of a known issue in February 2025 Windows 11 patch. The KB names KB5051987 for 24H2 and KB5051989 for 23H2 – my wife’s brand new (manufactured in September 2024) Windows 11 laptop however was on 22H2, so it didn’t get the update nor did it run into any trouble – I call that winning small by losing big! Well played, ASUS.

Some people online theorize that it’s caused by the Memory integrity (part of Core Isolation featureset under “Device security” in Settings) feature in Windows 11 getting an update that makes it reject the webcam driver.

While this sounds perfectly plausible – it’s an Intel driver, and they’ve got other stuff to worry about than keeping almost 12 months old legacy hardware working – it wasn’t the reason for me. I’ll mention the workaround for that issue below, though, as well as explain how I fixed it.

Solution

Let’s first take a quick look at the rumored cause (and the related workaround of disabling Memory Integrity), and then see what actually worked.

1. Workaround for the driver issue: Disable Core Isolation Memory Integrity

So here’s how to verify if Core Isolation is your issue.

Navigate to Device Security > Core Isolation, and disable “Memory Integrity”.

Then re-enable it – my understanding is that this should show you the names of incompatible drivers, and some people have seen their webcam drivers pop up here.

I didn’t, however, so being the good boy I am, I left Memory integrity enabled and proceeded with other fixes.

2. Update your webcam driver manually

The steps for you to get your proper driver package might vary. But in my case, I figured I’ll need top get the latest drivers from Dell again.

The webcam driver is called Intel 2D Imaging/MCU/Visual Sensing Controller Driver for Camera. It looked like it was from January 2025, so pretty recent.

When you download the file, turns out it’s from December 2024.

Now, as you might remember, my PC had just been reinstalled in the beginning of February with whatever version of 24H2 Microsoft decided was the baseline version at that point. I figured I probably have pretty new drivers already.

The driver versions I got then were as follows:

This poor webcam has been through some stuff.
This poor webcam has been through some stuff.
Driver Name: oem362.inf
Driver Package ID: iacamera64.inf_amd64_dbc79b97d6c00836
Class GUID: {ca3e7ab9-b4c3-4ae6-8251-579ef933890f}
Driver Date: 11/18/2024
Driver Version: 64.26100.13.17642
Driver Provider: Intel

And

Driver Name: oem141.inf
Driver Package ID: iacamera64_extension_dell_pista.inf_amd64_030fabf9f6e51ef6
Class GUID: {e2f84ce7-8efa-411c-aa69-97454ca4cb57}
Driver Date: 07/31/2024
Driver Version: 64.22000.16779.1
Driver Provider: Intel

And these worked just fine before the February 2025 update and, only broke about a week ago, when Microsoft decided it’s the right time to push the Cumulative Update to my machine.

Because at this time it’s stable enough. Allegedly.

But after the February update, and installing the updated driver from Dell, I got it working.

And now, with the February 2025 patch on Windows 24H2, these are the required driver versions:

Driver Name: oem27.inf
Driver Package ID: iacamera64.inf_amd64_19f644f8f1f7e0e8
Class GUID: {ca3e7ab9-b4c3-4ae6-8251-579ef933890f}
Driver Date: 07/31/2024
Driver Version: 64.26100.13.16779
Driver Provider: Intel

And

Driver Name: oem75.inf
Driver Package ID: iacamera64_extension_dell_pista.inf_amd64_030fabf9f6e51ef6
Class GUID: {e2f84ce7-8efa-411c-aa69-97454ca4cb57}
Driver Date: 07/31/2024
Driver Version: 64.22000.16779.1
Driver Provider: Intel

… if you’re looking real closely, you might see that one of the 2 drivers included in the package was downgraded when I installed the latest “January 2025” driver update from Dell.

And that downgraded driver worked just fine, whereas the one I got in the baseline 24H2 update did not work anymore.

Not after the February 2025 Patch update rolled in, anyway.

Never a boring day in the Window 24H2-land, it seems! Looking forward to what breaks next week. 🥲

mm
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