ODBC Data Source Administrator: Driver name is an empty string

Question

Below you will see a screen shot of a warning in Windows 7. Why would I get this error when opening up "Data Sources (ODBC)"? How can I resolve it? If you can give me some tips on where to start looking, I can make edits to this question to help diagnose the issue.

It's not critical that I fix this since I'm still able to add new data sources, but it's just annoying to see it every time I go into this dialog.

Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Data Sources (ODBC) > click "System DSN" tab

One other thing I'm noticing is that when I go into the "System DSN" tab for the first time, no data sources show up. If I click "Add" and then cancel, the list then populates with three data sources.

Answer 1

I had a key in this registry path that was not pointing to anything. So I removed it.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\ODBC\ODBC.INI

(this is the 64 bit window that pops up)

Realize that there is also a 32 bit window for ODBC that exists for this registry path:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\ODBC\ODBC.INI

C:\Windows\SysWOW64\odbcad32.exe

(Yes, even though it says WOW64, it means 32 bit.)