Microsoft is bringing in a new Windows Driver Foundation (WDF) which will hopefully begin to make up for some of the many deficiencies of the current driver model, which is kind of crap.
Some nice stuff here:
"One of the first things Microsoft has done in the new Windows Driver Foundation (WDF) is encapsulate boilerplate code in libraries. No more cut and paste. Just a call to a library that can be fixed, if necessary, with no impact on the millions of lines of code that depend on it, except that bugs will go away."
Hopefully this, and other advances going into Longhorn, will do something to improve the problems Windows users experience with poor drivers and the like.