After using BetterJoy, your controller stops working everywhere else: Steam can’t see it, other emulators can’t see it, sometimes it disappears from Windows entirely. It looks like the controller broke. It didn’t — it is almost certainly still on the HIDGuardian blacklist, and there is a specific recovery procedure. This scenario is literally the first entry in the project’s official FAQ, because BetterJoy adds your controller to that blacklist automatically when it starts. Do not start deleting drivers; follow the order below.
Why BetterJoy hides your controller in the first place
HIDGuardian is the legacy hiding layer bundled with BetterJoy v7.1. Its job is legitimate: it stops games from seeing the physical controller alongside BetterJoy’s virtual one (the double input problem). The side effect is persistence — the hiding outlives the session. If you close BetterJoy, uninstall things in the wrong order, or the service stops unexpectedly, the controller can stay hidden (“affected”) with no obvious way back. The warning from the project’s documentation ecosystem is worth repeating up front: uninstalling HIDGuardian must follow the official order — removing driver files directly can break more than the controller, in the worst accounts extending to keyboard and mouse input.
The recovery: release the device at localhost:26762
- Make sure the HidCerberus service is running — it is installed alongside HIDGuardian in the
Drivers\HIDGuardianfolder of the BetterJoy package. If you removed the service already, reinstall the package’s HIDGuardian component temporarily; you cannot release devices through a UI that no longer exists. - Open your browser and go to http://localhost:26762/ — this is the local HidCerberus control page served on your own machine, not a website.
- Find the Currently affected devices list.
- Remove every device from that list. The wiki’s instruction is explicit: all of them, not just the controller you are missing.
- Restart your PC. The release takes effect on reboot.
- After the restart, pair or plug in the controller and confirm it appears in
joy.cpland in your other programs again.
Related log lines you may have seen in BetterJoy’s console — HidGuardian was stopped. Starting..., Unable to start HidGuardian..., Unable to purge whitelist. — all belong to this layer misbehaving, and this recovery is the documented exit from that state.
Uninstalling HIDGuardian for good — in the safe order
If you are moving to the modern HidHide setup (recommended in our double input fix) or leaving BetterJoy entirely:
- Release all affected devices at localhost:26762 first (steps above) and reboot once.
- Then uninstall the driver using the package’s own “HIDGuardian Uninstall (Run as Admin).bat” in the same
Drivers\HIDGuardianfolder — that script exists precisely so you don’t hand-delete system driver files. - Reboot again, and verify the controller behaves normally with no hiding layer at all before installing anything new.
Skipping step 1 is the classic mistake: uninstall the layer while a device is still affected and the device has no manager left to release it.
If you no longer have the BetterJoy folder
A common dead end: you deleted the program folder weeks ago — taking the Drivers\HIDGuardian folder and its install/uninstall scripts with it — and the controller is still hidden. The recovery tools live in that folder, so get them back: download a fresh copy of the package from the download page, extract it anywhere convenient, and run the HIDGuardian install script once, as administrator, then reboot. That restores the HidCerberus service so the localhost:26762 page loads again. From there, follow the release steps above, then the ordered uninstall. Installing the layer again feels backwards when your goal is to remove it, but the release list is managed by that service — without it, there is nothing left that can free the device, and hand-deleting files in this state is how the situation gets worse.
Prevention: make BetterJoy clean up when it closes
Version 6 added a config option to remove affected devices when the application shuts down, with the release notes stating the intent plainly: it “should prevent any more issues of the controller being unusable after the program.” If you keep using the legacy layer, enable that shutdown cleanup so a normal exit leaves your controller usable by everything else — our config file guide explains where these legacy toggles live and why you should record original values before touching them. Also make a habit of closing BetterJoy normally rather than killing it in Task Manager; a killed process never runs its cleanup. If your controller instead is visible to Windows but BetterJoy itself won’t list it, that’s the mirror-image problem — work through the not-detected guide. The update guide also covers this recovery as part of old-driver cleanup when moving between versions.
FAQ
Is localhost:26762 safe? It looks like a random website.
It is a page served by the HidCerberus service on your own computer (localhost means “this machine”). Nothing is uploaded anywhere. It only exists while that service is installed and running.
The 26762 page won’t load. What now?
The HidCerberus service is not running — usually because it was uninstalled or disabled. Reinstall the HIDGuardian component from the BetterJoy package’s Drivers folder, reboot, and try the page again; then do the release and the ordered uninstall above.
Can I just switch to HidHide and skip all this?
Eventually, yes — HidHide is HIDGuardian’s maintained successor. But the release step is not skippable: a device still affected by HIDGuardian must be freed first, and the two drivers must never be installed at the same time. Free the device, uninstall in order, then set up HidHide. All related fixes are gathered on the troubleshooting hub.