I'm giving up. That's way to complicate. Just spent another hour clicking around with no result looking like the Howto.
Why do I need such weird tools? Why can't Hubitat just rid itself of "ghosts"? I never had a similar problem with Smartthings. It just worked. Just hated the cloud. sigh
I'm in a similar boat as the poster here and it sucks. My mesh was fine and over time seems to have gotten worse (probably due to a couple ghosts). I'm an engineer and love tinkering with things but the amount of time I've wasted on various bug squashing escapades over the past couple years makes me want to just throw everything in the trash.
I should have added, look at page 9 of the ghost removal instructions linked above. There is more detail than I included in my screenshots.
Same. But my mesh is solid and I made sure to remove my ghosts. My issue is definitely on Hubitat’s side.
I’ve confirmed this by running a secondary controller in my mesh and commanding it over home assistant. Shows every single device on my main hub, and where HE seems to constantly struggle with this, HASS and my secondary (not even a 700 series controller) perform the way Z-Wave should.
I think that is the key. The 700 chipset has some bugs to be worked out, and Hubitat is sorta stuck trying to mitigate things. I bet if there weren't chip shortages last year, Hubitat would have stuck with the C5 for a while longer until these bugs were better understood or fixed.
I get where you are coming from, but I think the root cause of the blame lies on the Zwave Alliance/Silabs.
It's not Hubitat, it's silicon labs and their sdk that's the problem. Another way to rid yourself is to cut power to the device that made the ghost then hit refresh on that line till it's gone
I tried this over night 2 days ago. Even after 4 hours having a generator with long cables running just to power my Internet access hardware and the hub I was not able to remove one single ghost. 
The thing is: if I knew it would fix the problem forever I would even restart from scratch, factory reset everything. But I fear I'll run into the same problem sooner or later because the root of the problem is not fixed.
I just about have given up removing devices from Hubitat. Its near impossible. Was trying to fix something yesterday and could not get it to work. Fired up the PC controller, click two buttons and poof the device is gone first try no complaints. I have a C7 and a 500 chip USB stick. I just yesterday ordered a 700 chip stick (for fun since shipping was same either way) and a UZB3 (for zniffer) so I will have to see if the 700 stick has similar issues or if it works perfectly like the 500 stick.
I have both the 500 and 700 sticks from SiLabs. Can't tell the difference.
Ok so then why is everyone blaming the 700 chip in the C7 for the ghost removal problems? If I can do it in two clicks from PC Controller, we should be able to do the same from the Hub. Or am I missing something?
It's not the chip.. It's the controller SDK that is required for 700 series hub certification..
Most of the failed node removal problems are:
So curious then does the PC Controller with a stick not follow this rule? I have never had removal fail from there even if the device is freshly factory reset (or re-paired as another device) but still powered up. That is what I was fighting yesterday and the Hub was giving me the typical ZWave Busy errors so I forced it out from the PC Controller, then once it was gone from there the Hub let me delete the device itself.
The upcoming SDK update will alleviate new database corruption, but doesn’t retroactively fix nodes that already had corrupt information. So any new nodes added should not suffer from corruption.
Sure doesn’t .. PC Controller still uses the older serialAPI functions
It would be nice if Silicon Labs put out a statement that they're still beta testing the 700 chipset on people's production systems. I can't understand why the device and hub companies aren't screaming about their support costs and customer satisfaction issues. (I imagine they are privately.) I guess SL must not care that much as they make Zigbee and Thread chipsets too.
Is there going to be a way to identify corrupt nodes so we can remove and re-pair them? I assume this is just in the Zwave data and not the hubitat device list. The device I was just fighting with I suspect got corrupted because it lost a bunch of the info from the Data section at the bottom and would not talk to the hub anymore. I ended up re-pairing it, then swapping the DNI's so I could keep it attached to all the apps. Then for good measure I factory reset it again and did a replace so it would re-join properly on the new DNI using the original device and populate all the data fields correctly (I also wanted to test doing a replace on S2 Auth using the DSK which worked BTW). Then finally I forced out the old broken zwave node and deleted the now ghosted device.
I've never had what I'd call good luck with Home Assistant. I fired up a VM for it 8-9 times and eventually just shut it down due to frustration. The furthest I ever got with it was to add 4 ZWave devices: Recessed Door Sensor, RGBW bulb, Appliance Module (Wall Wart Relay) and a MultiSensor 6. Took DAYS to get them to be functional. I then switched to ZWave-JS and overcame those foibles. The system was stable and reliable for a couple months BUT I just couldn't justify the amount of time it took to add a new device type to the mix. I let it run for months as I said and every now and again... weeks apart usually... I'd move the Door Sensor and watch the RGB bulb come on and hear the Wall Wart relay click. Eventually I shut it down because I wasn't using it and was convinced that left untouched, it was completely reliable. A couple days ago, I got curious again and fired up the VM. Within seconds of it completing the boot, I tried the Door Sensor again and instantly the RGB Bulb came on and the wall wart clicked. I had never done anything with the ZWave devices themselves... so it was pretty satisfying to have it work correctly, instantly, after months of having the VM shut.
Then I violated the rules, angered the gods, etc. Looking at the GUI, everything had an update available. ZWave-JS, Platform, OS, SSH, File Browser, etc. I updated.
All of the updates completed and at intermediate steps everything worked. But after upgrading the platform, nothing worked. Actually ZWave-JS was what was not working. It had worked after it's update, but after the platform update, it didn't work. Breaking Changes... sort of synonymous with Home Assistant, right? 
Not only what @bcopeland said BUT, the PC Controller software makes the failure more visible. PC Controller does two steps.. you can't click Replace/Remove without first going through IsFailed.
IF... IF IsFailed works, and finds that a node has failed, it marks it failed and does exactly nothing more. Then Remove does ANOTHER check and if it's not failing a 2nd time, it gives up.
My experience is that the Hub (invisibly) does the same steps. The visibility in PC Controller probably eases the frustration because we can clearly see IsFailed failed
As Brian said, PC Controller still uses the serialAPI method of communicating. You know.. USB'ish. That interface is the same for 700 and 500 series chips which is why PC Controller appears identical for either a 500 series Stick or a 700 series Stick.
Download the Hubitat app
