In my experience, this has been for USB device drivers.
On Vista, if you have successfully installed drivers and your device is STILL not recognized, go to the device manager and look for unrecognized devices, then right click on it and have Vista find the best driver. It should now find the driver and install it correctly.
OK, this is twice now that I have tried to get USB drivers installed on Vista. Both times there was a driver specifically built for Vista and both had installers that are supposed to just do it for you. One was on my home PC which is now a Vista 64bit machine and the other is my laptop which is a Vista 32bit machine.
First was the WG111T wireless adapter from NetGear of which I have blogged about previously on my PC and the second is my Sky Caddie on my laptop.
The makers of Sky Caddie, Sky Hawke Technologies, has done a fairly good job at automating many of the tasks required to use and keep a Sky Caddie up to date. It has client software (sort of, it runs in a browser) and when you connect your Sky Caddie it will perform an update check and update the firmware as needed.
I was on a road trip, had my laptop and my Sky Caddie and wanted to download a course I would be playing to my Sky Caddie using my laptop. I downloaded the Sky Caddie software which includes the drivers and successfully installed everything I needed. At least that was what the install process reported back to me.
Now I can plug my Sky Caddie in and away we go. Doh! The Sky Caddie client can't find my Sky Caddie even though it is plugged in using the USB port and turned on. Since I had this issue with the WG111T wireless adapter, I checked the device manager. And there it was... USB device not recognized! I right clicked on it and "updated the device driver" and let Vista find the driver. A few seconds later, the driver is installed and my Sky Caddie is now recognized.
For some reason, and I am thinking it is a permissions issue, installer software has not been able to install the correct driver for their own device. I think this could be 1 of 3 things: Vista won't give permission, the installer software was not coded correctly to get permission, or simply a Vista bug.
I will repeat the first paragraph:
On Vista, if you have successfully installed drivers and your device is STILL not recognized, go to the device manager and look for unrecognized devices, then right click on it and have Vista find the best driver. It should now find the driver and install it correctly.
My golf buddies and I ended up shooting par. +3 on the front 9 and -3 on the back 9 =)