When a Plug and Play device is connected to a USB port, Windows queries it to find some IDs (returned as strings) which were assigned to the device by its manufacturer and burned into the device when it was built. The ids (in particular the device_id) are how Windows goes about selecting the best driver for the device.
I would 1) verify the device_id it's sending to Windows and 2) look at the set of drivers Windows selects as candidates for that device_id and which one it chooses as the "best" driver of its choices. My guess is that device id is correct (and it it reports the same id to both XP and Vista) but its the
driver that's selected that's different. On XP, it's selecting a driver which must also be used by a camera or the whoever provided the driver happens to have assigned a misleading (i.e. wrong) string as the driver description (which is defined within the driver, itself).
The following instructions are for XP. Not certain if also true (or somewhat different) for Vista
Find the Device Id
To see the device_id you must first set an option to show Details in Device Manager
- If Device Manager happens to be open, close it along with all device property sheets.
- Select Control Panel / System / Advanced / Environment Variables / System variables / New.
- Set the environment variable name to DEVMGR_SHOW_DETAILS and its value to 1. Be sure to enter the variable name exactly as i indicated (including the under_scores)
Now, find the device in Device Manager and right click for
Properties. You'll now see a
Details tab! Click it and you should see a pull down list which is probably already showing
Device Instance Id and it displays a string which looks something like:
USB\VID_xxxx&PID_yyyy where
xxxx is the vendor id (a number managed by the USB.org which uniquely identifies the device vendor) and
yyyy is the product id (a number controlled and assigned by the vendor to identify their device). The remainder of the device_id string is version information and possibly other stuff too but the detail of which i don't recall off hand.
See the list of drivers Windows evaluated for the device. And which one it picked
Download
devcon. It's a command line utility. (Store devcon.exe in
C:\Windows\system32 unless you understand the PATH variable in which case you can put it anywhere!)
Now from a command window (Start->Run, enter cmd, hit ENTER) type
devcon drivernodes USB\VID_xxxx&PID_yyyy
(just type that first part of the device id string you found, where xxxx and yyyy are the actual numbers you saw). Devcon lists all the drivers it found as candidates. It also lists the driver rank it assigned each candidate in determining which one is best. (As i recall, the higher the rank the better the fit. Who ever supplied the final choice for use as the driver, indicated a description of camera! You should see the driver description as well in the devcon output.
