I had driver installation issues on a recently purchased Vista Desktop (Gateway GT5656). The first issue came about when I tried to attach an external SATA Hard Drive enclosure by Antec. The add hardware wizard couldn’t find an driver automatically for the device. On top of this, Antec didn’t release a driver for this enclosure because Windows should already have the driver.

The second device I had issues with was a new HP Officejet J5740. The HP installation software (already terrible software, but that’s for another day) would install the driver, but when it would go to actually connect the device it would hang infinitely. If I tried to manually install the printer drivers from the CD, the Add Hardware wizard would report it couldn’t find any drivers that would work for the device.

After some digging on the web I came across a knowledge base article (940199) at Microsoft’s website that provided a solution for both issues. Apparently Vista can have issues repairing/replacing a damaged Infcache.1 file. At the knowledge base article they provide a hotfix for the issue.

Once I installed the hotfix the printer installed without any issues. The external hard disk enclosure also worked without any issues.