Nico, that is an excellent find.
The camera normally does not have to be connected. However I just tried my Windows 10 and got the same problem if the camera is not plugged in. I am sure everything worked fine a few days ago before I installed a whole bunch of updates. Thank you Microsoft
(No such issues on Win7)
The driver is 32-bit only, just like most of ASCOM. We cannot easily go to 64-bit as the low level DLL is written in Delphi and my Delphi compiler is about 10 years old and cannot do 64-bit.
There is an option, as mentioned
here, to do an universal driver but I never got around to it.
By the way, you can use ASCOM Profile Explorer to change any camera settings. But I think only the Trace (logging) gets hidden when the camera is connected.