Suddenly getting Device Driver Errors

[Richie_OLSJ]

Right, over the summer I've re-installed most computers in the school and added ActivInspire 1.2, plus the latest ActivDriver (5.1.1.25). We now have ActivStudio 1,2,3 and ActivInspire (some staff just won't let go of the old stuff).
We have a range of boards: TDS ActivBoard, Activboard, ActivboardV2, Activboard V3.
Some boards are serial, some are USB, some are connected via Prolific Serial to USB converters.
Every computer is installed via the same install image.
On a number of machines - mainly serial connected (but not all) the board doesn't work and in Device Manager I get the following error:
Windows cannot load the device driver for this hardware. The driver may be corrupted or missing. (Code 39)
Uninstalling the driver and reinstalling makes no difference, neither does rebooting PC or whiteboard.
Completely re-installing the computer makes no difference either.
So, thinking the issue is with this new Activdriver, I reinstalled a few machines with the old 4.1.9 driver that I KNEW worked... only to have the same result.
Anyone come across this before because it has me very puzzled?

Could it be an issue with ActivInspire, rather than the driver?
If so (or even if not) why would it work on some PCs and not others?

[Daniel Bunker]

We've had a few problems with devices not being recognised with the latest driver - 5.1.2.7. We have been able to amnually fix these by going into device manager and manually assiging the devices, navigating to the folder with the driver file in it. However - if you change the USB port we found you had to go throught the process again for each USB slot.

[Richie_OLSJ]

Hmm, you seem to have a newer driver than me - looks like I'll have to find somewhere to download it...
However, this doesn't seem to be the issue we are having as we are getting this problem mainly with serial connected boards (but not all the serial connected boards) - plus, the older driver doesn't work any more on the affected boards. It all seems to point to the latest xp install that the computers have (yet the same install works perfectly on other computers).
There appears to be no real common link between them, so i can't understand why all boards are not either working or not working, rather than some just not working.
Could there be some weird corruption being caused by ActivInspire affecting both old and new drivers in some way on some machines?
Would it be worth considering firmware updates on affected boards (even though they used to work perfectly with driver 4.1.9)?

Richie