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I'm pretty sure you're missing one of Sony's battery checker driver (which checks if the battery is genuine). Try looking at your model on Sony eSupport for that file.
Looks like a missing SFEP (Sony Firmware Extension Parser) driver.
Can you confirm it is installed? Sometimes, I noticed it does not install directly from the Sony's setup executable - so here is a quick fix, assuming it is the SFEP which is causing the problem:
- Download the latest SFEP driver from Sony's website for your Z3
- Extract the driver with Universal Extractor (just point it out to the install .exe file - it will create a folder with unpacked driver)
- Go to Device Manager, and locate the "Unknown Device" with an exclamation mark - you might have few of them, so you will need to try with every one of them. Use manual driver install, and point Windows to the folder that Universal Extractor created
That should install SFEP for sure, and the ridiculous battery checker will work.
Another way to do it is just to remove the battery checker by deleting auto start entry from the Registry and deleting its folder form Program Files - but if the cause is missing SFEP, other things will also not work like auto-brightness, vaio keys, etc... - so you might want to check for SFEP issues first anyway, even if you want to delete the battery checker afterwards.
Problems? See this thread at archive.org.
