Give Microsoft their due, they overall did a pretty good job with the driver detection in WinXP, and an excellent one in Vista and Win7 There aren't many issues I can think of that are common: just this one with the AC97 sound drivers (always ID the motherboard or laptop maker and download from there) and a problem with ALPS laptop touchpads where the updated driver doesn't work In some cases M$ actually do a better job than the manufacturers. For instance there is a perenniel problem with some Intel chipsets where Intel's chipset drivers crash the USB ports - resulting in a BSOD at boot Only way round it is to extract/unpack the Intel driver exe using 7-zip, and then update the "missing" items in device manager from the .inf files, leaving the USB drivers alone as the native Microsoft drivers are stable