To be fair, drivers are a much more difficult problem for Microsoft because they don't control the hardware like Apple does. There are way more devices out there for Windows machines, and an insane number of combinations that have to work together without ever having been tested together.
If Windows Update was able to fix the problem after being reinitialized, then your original description sounds more like a Windows Update hiccup rather than an inherent driver issue.
Random thought: I wonder if Microsoft has ever considered adding a built-in test suite to consumer Windows to flog drivers.
I could see the benefits of being able to throw up a "Warning: {Device name} is not behaving properly and may cause system instability" prompt. As opposed to just screwing up behavior at user interaction time without a clear "That piece of hardware you bought / company you bought it from is a POS" message.
Isn't this basically what WHQL does without the blaming? And that's enforced on 64-bit systems unless you manually turn it off. Afaik part of the WHQL process is Microsoft installing the driver on thousands of different hardware configurations and seeing if it misbehaves.
I'm not contrasting windows to anything. The fact is that with every Windows Whatever I must go to sites and download new drivers, experiencing a lot of frustration on the way, or buy a new device only to make new generation of windows kernel developers happy. "Few times" is too much.
