Grrrr. Ok I got a Umax USB scanner for my Win2k machine. The original driver was strictly Win98. No biggy I figured correctly that Umax would support Win2k. But being a typical guy... I like to do things first and read the directions later.

Well if I had read the fine print, I would have found that I had to install the 98 driver, reboot, install the 2000 driver, reboot and finally attach the USB cable. Not exactly what I did. So the damn thing didn't work. So I uninstalled everything, went back and installed everything the correct way and it still didn't work.

Now I know that the scanner does indeed work under Win2k because after my disaster at the office, I paid attention to detail when I set one up at home... works great. But the damn thing wont work on this machine. I went thru, copied all the files that my non-working driver was using in \Winnt\inf and \winnt\system32 and renamed them (scarry I know) and tried to reinstall the driver still to no avail.

I've had this problem before with customers that totally screwed up their systems installing the wrong drivers and Windows simply will not switch out the non-working drivers for working ones. Now in my customers case, I just ghosted their system with an image I had and sent him on his merry way... obviously not an option in my case. How do you get rid of these damn defunct drivers???

If the pen is mightier than the sword, just imagine what I could do with a mouse.