FTDI Serial Drivers again?!

[westfw]

So what's up with this?  I thought it was supposed to be "fixed", but:

1) There have been a recent flurry of reports of bricked Arduino Nano boards.
2) There is no new version of the driver at FTDI.
3) "Search windows update for driver" is apparently still sending the broken 2.12 (at least to my W7 laptop.)
4) There's a 7-nov "optional" windows driver update for FTDI, but it fails to actually install (on said W7 laptop.)  Mostly some unknown error code, but occasionally "you already have a newer driver."
5) It seems to be a real PITA to get W7 to use an older version of a driver.  It kept "helpfully" updating a manually-installed 2.10 to 2.12.

WTF?  (Can someone confirm this sort of behavior?  Windows in not my primary OS, so the laptop might not be "well configured.  But I didn't expect this level of difficulty!   Also, I don't think I have any counterfeit FT232 chips/boards, so I guess they could have "fixed" the problem without updating the driver version number (which would be stupid and unlikely.)   Did anyone ever end up with a contact at Microsoft and/or FTDI who claimed to be "handling" this particular problem?  Hopefully the latest state of brokenness is some silly mistake somewhere, due to incompetence, and not "oh, we'll just wait a while and try the brickware again!" malfeasance...  Not that that would be good. :-( )

[rdl]

It's best to not let Windows update drivers for hardware, since most of the time it is barely able to update itself correctly. The option for this is not in Windows Update, but in the "Advanced system settings".