Disable a button on an Xbox controller on Windows?

Question

So, here's my use case - I own a Band Hero drumkit for the Xbox 360. It gets picked up by my Xbox 360 wireless receiver on Windows without any issues, and it's even recognised as a drum kit. So far, so good.
However, the moment I strike any of the drum heads, the controller registers a button 9 press that remains held for as long as the kit is turned on. This, as you can imagine, makes it impossible to map the pads to anything useful - everything gets mapped to that blasted button 9.
I decided to figure out what button 9 even is, and as it turns out, it's the left stick button press. The drum kit doesn't even have any thumbsticks, so I have zero idea why it's even sending out the signal.
So, here's my question: is it possible to disable that particular button through the drivers somehow? I could just buy a replacement drum brain, but those are increasingly scarce, and if there's an easy software fix, I can live with that.

Jake Armstrong · Answer

As long as the controller just being plugged in doesn't mess with the game, you can use software like Joy2Key or Joystick Gremlin to bind your controller to the keyboard or a virtual joystick and then have the game use that instead. Both of those programs don't care if a button is held down and will ignore it and let you set up whatever mapping you want.
If the game happens to be a Steam game, it may be possible to use Steam Input settings as well. I have used this to force games to ignore joystick input.

Disable a button on an Xbox controller on Windows?

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