Quoting Adam Borowski (kilobyte@???):

> Well, about that... Not so long ago I helped a relative by installing
> Redmontware. It was a long, arduous process, during which I had to fetch
> and copy in drivers for six pieces of hardware. Most of those couldn't be
> even found on their manufacturer's website -- I had to scour some random
> seedy webpages.

Some of the drivers, even those shipped _with_ Redmondware, were
notoriously so buggy that you could seldom make them function at all. I
believe it was 1998 that I spent a week at a client site in Portland,
Oregon, and among other things was putting 3Com 3C905TX PCI NICs into
workstations running MS-Windows 98. ISTR that I had access to the NDIS
driver both from the OS and directly from 3Com -- and the problem was
that, about 19 times out of 20, Device Manager showed the driver to be
non-functional after you assembled the network stack. So, you deleted
the entire network stack, maybe waved a dead chicken or two, reinstalled
the NIC driver and network stack again, and re-tested. Repeat until it
suddenly works. Nobody knew of a better workaround, and impliedly OEMs
who shipped a working configuration with 3C905TX NICs had gone through
the same madness until a test box worked, and then disk-imaged that
fluke success for mass replication.