I've done some more research on this and have the following to add:

On Tue, Aug 04, 2026 at 05:21:28PM +0200, Sergio Gelato wrote:
> Seen on a Lenovo ThinkStation P620:

And on a Dell workstation.

> However, no Dell dock is attached to this stationary computer.

An analysis of fwupd's history database indicates that one was attached for a 
few minutes five years ago. On both affected computers.

> I've read https://github.com/fwupd/fwupd/issues/7894 and tried removing and 
> regenerating /var/lib/fwupd/pending.db, to no avail.

I now believe this is because I didn't "service fwupd restart" after the 
removal. Once I did that, the history was indeed reset.

It seems the proper way to clear the history is to run "fwupdtool 
clear-history". I *think* one doesn't need to restart the fwupd service when 
doing things this way.

One can probably also selectively purge the Dell dock-related records from the 
history, at least if one is willing to edit the history database directly with 
sqlite3. Or maybe just clear the "needs activation" flag with an SQL UPDATE.

> The list of updatable devices does include some Western Digital hard disks 
> (WD100EFAX); an overly loose regular expression, perhaps?

Red herring, it turns out. No regular expressions involved, just ancient and 
long-forgotten events.

I'll let this bug report stand as documentation in case someone else runs into 
something similar. The user interface could be friendlier but that's a generic 
wishlist item.

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