Very Odd Wired Keyboard 600 Problem -- Win7 x64 refuses install  

Yes. Exactly identical. It still tries to find a driver for the KB on Windows Update, can't, and doesn't find anything that it likes locally on the disk either.

Last night I went rooting around in the Control Set Class listings, and the vid/pid entries ARE THERE and do point to the correct place (the same place the Comfort Keyboard 2000 point to), and there are no filters on the base entry either so it should attach.

Something is hosed, probably in the registry -- but there's no log I can find telling me what it doesn't like nor can I find documentation anywhere on exactly what has to be where in the registry (or on the disk, in what file/directory) for the attachment to succeed.

I suspect I'm going to wind up reloading this thing.... even though that pizzes me off due to the time required to reload all my applications and such. Thank god my data is on a NAS (running Unix, natch, which has undergone more upgrades and such than I can count over nearly two decades without a single hitch) and thus is impervious to this nonsense.

I gave up and ran a repair install - that appears to be ok, but I am still validating it. If not, well, I'll go back to the backup, reload that, drop all the credentials off the programs in question and reload the box from zero.

Thanks -- marked solved although the "solved" was a reload

Unless someone has a fairly clean description of exactly how Windows 7 processes a connecting USB device, including how it uses the VID and PID fields (which is the identity information the device uses originally) to determine what driver(s) to associate with it and what can modify that (e.g. why it would go looking to Windows Update for a driver when the pid/vid identification is present in the registry and declares it as associated with the correct driver) I don't know how we'll ever figure that out.

I know how Linux does this and where it looks, and as such tracing problems like this on those systems is pretty trivial. For Windows.... not so much.