All computer gear requires drivers, that is for sure.
I've installed a heap of equipment on my Windas computer here, mainly because it won't work with any other OS.
That alone is a thing that I won't go into.
Now, I had a camera that I installed recently (or at least tried to), it was sold as Plug'n'Play, yet Windows would not accept the drivers for the device, even though it was "Digitally Signed" according to the Device Manager in my laptop.
Just who is being conned here?.
I couldn't care less about Vista, but even getting something simple done in XP "Pro", is a non-event.
In any device I've ever tried to get to agree with Windas, it is frustrating, it is annoying.
Most of the "Help" stuff is written by Windas fanboys anyway, so you only get thier opinions.
Dig a bit deeper, (if you have time) and you get the feeling that once the gear is sold, they don't care.
Windas Plug'n'Play is a joke.
Anyone that has been through the Windas "New Hardware Installation Wizard" a few times would have to agree with me.
Especially after a few prompts of either "Windows cannot find the disk you inserted, please insert a disk into D:\" or more commonly "The disk you have inserted does not contain the information required, please try again"
Computers have been dumbed down too much under Microsoft.

Plug and Pray seldom really works. I usually just bypass all of that stuff and use the install/setup file on tre disk that comes with the hardware if there is one.
Sometimes using the "reinstall driver and "have disk" options from the control panel/system tab get you by the windoze problems. Make sure you don't have any hardware conflicts. That usually gets tagged on the system tab.

Mike, try to check the name of the searched file during"The disk you have inserted does not contain the information required, please try again" message, go to search, and look for the file on the disk yourself. The best thing to do is to go onto the website of the manufacturer, and look up the driver.

I can't see how its Microsoft's fault that some 3rd party hardware vendor offers poor support for the worlds most popular operating system. I gave up griping about Microsoft quality after they released win95. They finally got their OS in the same ballpark as OS/2 (though years later). There is no other OS company that supports the shear volume of peripherals as Microsoft's do. And unless you really hose up winXP, it works very well. Getting things to work well, for the widest range of users, given the millions of combinations of hardware configurations possible is a big task. Give in to the dark side Luke!

Mike,
My experience has been that the installation grief has come from my computer seeing the new hardware before the new software. The successful flow is usually running a setup, then rebooting, and only then, connecting the new hardware. Is this how you have been doing it?
Joe

I would agree to "most common", but not "most popular".

The real problem is microsoft's very liberal intrepretation of their own published interface standards.
Windoze is basically a 30 megabyte operating system with 500 megabites of patches on it. Instead of fixing problems they just write another couple of megabytes of code around it. They also force everyone to install software a fraction of a percent of users will ever want or use.
That is why I still have several DOS machines that can load and run all the software I use off a single diskette (about 100kb). The W/98 equivilent solution is well over 200 meg and requires over twice as much CPU power.