I have Vista loaded on my work computer and it started acting wonky. I would plug in my generic USB drive or two and Vista would prompt me for drivers. Drivers?!? for a USB drive? I scoured the interwebs looking for an answer, hoping that someone else had dealt with this and figured it out.
Well, I found a couple of sites where people had ‘solutions, but none worked until I found one that said something that sounded wierd (I’ll try to get the originating website). The answer: Copy the \Windows\Inf file to another location (outside of \Windows), then reboot. Next time Windows can’t find a driver, point it over to your copy of \Inf.
It may not work for you, but it did solve my problem…