niemiro
- thanks for your welcome words.
I believe that you should go and review the issue and details I posted in my thread over on the microsoft forums.
Now, for full disclosure I didn't read through this entire thread here. I read enough to see that many were having the problem and that no one had come up with a proper solution.
The issue at hand with the SP1 install to Windows 7 - which is what this thread is about (so no need to discuss the Vista or 2008 topics) - has to do with problems in the the driver catalogs.
I can guarantee that if you don't follow my instructions as I wrote them in the linked thread regarding the access denied errors then you will not be able to solve the issue (I evidence this by the dozens of posts I've seen by people having this issue who could only resolve it following my steps).
There is nothing "dodgy" about my recommendations - what is dodgy is how Windows 7 deals with security

. Reinjecting the driver with the pnputil effectively updates the catalog. However, this won't work in many cases because of the permissions on the file. Renaming the file as I suggest will allow the driver to be reinjected.
Thus I am (A) NOT recommending to delete any files, simply rename them and (B) my method of running the pnputil will immediately copy the appropriate file back to the store so when you say I am supplying "no alternative" - I'm not sure what you mean.
Additionally, I'd like to note that the link you posted from the Microsoft Reduce Customer Effort center was basically a MS tech who created a blog entry that contained all the steps that everyone found unsuccessful in solving this problem, followed by a quick reference to what I detailed in my post. In essence, they stole my solution (not like I'm trying to copyright it

) and did a very poor job of explaining the more important parts of it!
I don't know why so many people feel obligated to try to summarize an already streamlined procedure and thus create more confusion or misinformation.
I highly recommend if you are experiencing this issue to just look at my
post in the original thread
good luck!
Oh - I also want to note that the recommended solutions of doing an in-place upgrade my work for some, and I suspect many home users would simple skip to that since it is a sweeping approach. i arrived at my solution since I didn't feel running an in-place upgrade on multiple systems was a feasible approach for a sys-admin. Granted, my method isn't easily automated, but should be much quicker.