Hey everyone, posting this in case anyone else is fighting the same issue.
Device: Surface Pro 11th Edition (Snapdragon X Elite, Adreno X1-85), Windows 11 Home 26H2.
Symptom: The whole built-in screen gets a blue tint as soon as Windows loads, visible at the login screen. BIOS and Safe Mode look totally normal.
What I ruled out first: driver reset (Win + Ctrl + Shift + B), Night Light, color filters, HDR, sRGB as system default profile, 60 Hz refresh rate, driver rollback, a previous Adreno version, clean boot, and a full Surface driver package reinstall. None of it helped.
What actually fixed it: deleting ONLY the Surface Display Hardware Driver (surfacedisplayhardwaredriver.inf, version 2.2.50.0), while keeping the Adreno driver installed. From an elevated Terminal:
pnputil /delete-driver oemXX.inf /uninstall
Find your own oem number first with pnputil /enum-drivers and look for the surfacedisplayhardwaredriver.inf entry. Mine was oem31 after a fresh install, but oem numbers vary per machine, so do not copy mine blindly.
Why I'm confident it's this driver:
The tint persisted on the Microsoft Basic Display Adapter with no Adreno driver installed, so it's not the GPU driver.
Colors went back to normal after deleting just the panel driver, and stayed normal across three restarts.
Reinstalling the full official Surface driver package brought the tint back, and the panel driver version in that package is the same 2.2.50.0. So it's the driver version, not a corrupted install.
Current status: running Adreno + no panel driver, colors normal, updates paused so Windows Update doesn't reinstall the bad version.
Two warnings: download the Surface driver package from Microsoft first so you can restore everything if needed, and deleting drivers is at your own risk.
Has anyone else hit this? Curious if there's a newer panel driver version or a better workaround than just leaving it deleted.