Windows Needs to Install Driver Software

I have Vista Ultimate installed on my laptop. For some time, whenever I connected a new device, I would be greeting by the message "Windows Needs to Install Driver Software " and I would need to tell it to search for the driver. At first I thought this was the new way of doing things in Vista. After seeing that it wasn't the case on other machines, I started looking into the issue.

I found an article on Microsoft's site called "Where Setup Searches for Drivers." Here I learned that

After a device is attached, Setup first attempts to locate and install a driver in a trusted system context without user interaction

If Setup cannot locate a driver that can be installed without user interaction in a trusted system context, Setup attempts to locate and install a driver in the interactive context of an administrator, as follows:

(Windows Vista) If the user has enabled connecting to Windows Update to download matching drivers, the Found New Hardware wizard accesses Windows Update to download matching drivers without displaying a wizard page. If the user has configured Windows Update to ask every time a new device is connected, Windows displays a wizard page that prompts the user for permission to access Windows Update to download matching drivers. The Found New Hardware wizard also searches for drivers that were preloaded in the locations that are specified by the DevicePath registry value.

If the Found New Hardware wizard downloads matching drivers from Windows Update or locates matching preloaded drivers, the Found New Hardware wizard does not prompt the user for a distribution medium. Otherwise, the Found New Hardware wizard prompts the user for a distribution medium and attempts to find matching drivers on the distribution medium.

Now I knew what my problem was. My machine wasn't finding the driver in my inf folder. I did a few more searches and came across this page "Removing PnP drivers from Vista's driver store" Here I learned about the c:\windows\inf\setupapi.dev.log file. Now I could see what was happening when I inserted new hardware.

Next I found the wonderfully titled form post "Vista Playing Dumb, Can't find a Driver for anything!" Here I found my solution. I deleted the "INFCATCHE.1" file in C:\Windows\inf" folder. I had to change the security permissions to be able to delete. After deleting the file, I plugged in the flash drive I had been testing with and it installed perfectly any user intervention!

Of course after fixing the problem, I found this page describing and giving the solution to my problem. "How-to: Find “lost” Windows Vista Drivers when adding a new device."