Kinect not working on one of my test systems, finally got it working…

Well this was a big duh!  I had installed the most current Kinect SDK v1 and it would not detect the Windows Kinect.  I had uninstalled the Research SDK and thought everything was ready to go. 

Then I uninstalled the latest Kinect SDK and reinstalled it.  Still no work.  Then I checked the Control Panel unintall panel, there I had two Microsoft Server Speech SDK, one for 64-bit and 32-bit.  So I removed these old speech input tools, either from the Microsoft Speech SDK Version 5.1 or Microsoft Speech Server Deployment: Speech-Enabled Sample (more likely the latter). 

So there are a number of posts to the forum that talk about registry searches, which I did but found nothing, after I removed the Microsoft Speech Server using the uninstall in Control Panel.  When you do the search, you may find SAPI.DLL or similar, these do not appear to cause the failure in the case of the Kinect SDK v1.

Bottom line: If Kinect SDK V1 does not light up, make sure to check carefully for the Microsoft Speech Server using Control Panel.  That way you won’t have to rebuild your machine.

URRRRGGGHHHHH!