NULL PNP Serial Driver???

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From: Frank Schwab (FSchwab_at_GTCOCalcomp.com)
Date: 04/23/04 

Date: Thu, 22 Apr 2004 17:36:04 -0700

We have been building serial devices for many years. None have been plug-and-play compliant, because many of our customers have written support code into their applications rather than using drivers. Don't laugh, but some of these programs have been continuously supported since the DOS days. In many cases, the code to talk to the tablets was written 10 or 15 years ago, and the programmers who did it have left - and nobody wants to touch it.

Our next generation devices will have both USB (HID) and Serial interfaces, and the plan is to make the serial interface Plug-N-Play. For about half of our customers, this will work well because they will use our drivers to talk to the devices. For the other half, however, the half that simply opens a COM port and directly controls our devices, we have a problem - the "Found New Hardware Wizard".

Of course, the dinosaurs who are doing things themselves are using just about every version of Windows you can imagine. When my paycheck relies on shipping product out the door, I can't very well tell them "Well, if you're not going to run a supported OS, and use our supported driver, we're not gonna sell product to you". There are just too many of them.

So, my question is,
Is it possible to satisfy PNP enumeration (and gets rid of the wizard) using an inf file which doesn't install a driver?
Is it possible to write a driver which satisfies PNP enumeration but leaves the port open, either by exiting immediately or simply closing the port?

Offers to implement non-trivial solutions will be seriously considered...

/frank

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