Friend does incident response and Windows forensics, and pointed something (in retrospect) rather obvious out yesterday: the instructions for cleaning up simply told people to "delete .SYS files according to this wildcard". No additional context.

That caught his eye, because to him it sounded like madness. Apparently deleting random driver files is a fairly well known way to screw a Windows system up even more than it already was.

This statement from CS must have gone through legal and PR review, so we have to assume every word and statement has been carefully vetted from a cover-your-backside perspective. It is light on information content, but there must be reason for them to so forcefully telegraph that the files being deployed (and removed) are not themselves drivers.