How do I know which one of these is true ? One message says the driver is installed, the other one says he's still installing it. Like, Huh ? The little spinning circle just keeps on, like forever. 
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4 Answers
There is a blue circle next to "Installing driver software". When it is finished, this will be either a green tick or a red cross to specify the outcome of the installation.
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The little spinning circle continued for something like 45 minutes, essentially, I think, it was in an infinite loop.– User.1Commented Dec 27, 2012 at 15:30
As noted by @Jamie, the system will have an icon for the result. However, I have seen cases where a window has popped under other windows and is waiting for input from the user. Pressing ALT-TAB will quickly show such a window.
Think of the blue text as more of a general header. It is not giving you status information, it is simply telling you that the device has been installed (i.e., connected).
The black text is the one giving you status information about the driver installation. Some devices are actually composed of multiple components (like external drives) and so will have more than one line and spinning circle.
When you install hardware, Windows has to identify it then install drivers for it as well as all of its constituent components. This can take quite a while if you are using a freshly installed system or have used a cleanup tool to remove temporary files. This happens because Windows must built a driver cache by reading and parsing every single driver in its driver store. In Windows Vista+, this can mean several thousand .inf files!
How long has it been spinning? Do you see the hard-drive light flickering, indicating that the system is using the drive?
If the HDD LED is flickering, then just leave it be and Windows will eventually finish. If it is not flickering at all, then Windows may be stuck. You could try unplugging it and plugging it back in to see if Windows will get it right the next time. You could also try installing it in safe-mode.
An easier thing to do is to check your Internet connection because what may be happening is that Windows is trying to find a driver on Windows Update, but it cannot connect, so it is hanging there.
Also, check for any firewall prompts because I have seen plenty of programs seemingly “freeze” when all that was happening is that it was trying to access the Internet, and the firewall threw up a prompt asking whether to grant it permission, but the prompt got hidden somehow (clicked Show Desktop just after the prompt was display?) and so the app was left hanging, waiting for permission.
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@Syntech, the spinning circle continued for 45 minutes. I honestly don't know where the Blinking LED for the HDD is on this machine. I'm looking at it (i.e., the machine) and I see 4 little green LEDs and they are in a steady-state glow; not sure what (if anything) that means.– User.1Commented Dec 27, 2012 at 16:07
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@Syntech, and Jamie and Dave M also, What I'm doing is disconnecting a bluetooth adapter, and then reconnecting him. This is all to emulate a serial port across a USB connection. I'm developing an app that talks to a small box in the same room acroos the BlueTooth connection. From time to time, something gets really screwy; something I haven't figured out yet, but is causing me an error which is: The semaphore timeout period has expired, something I am learning to learn. What I'm trying to do is disconnect the adapter and reconnect it; without requiring a full power down.– User.1Commented Dec 27, 2012 at 16:27
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Did the adapter come with its own driver disc? Maybe Windows doesn’t have the right drivers for it and the generic ones are not working with it. Did you try safe-mode?– SynetechCommented Dec 27, 2012 at 16:56
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No, and no. At the moment, what I'm doing is to (1) unplug the physical thing from the USB port, (2) wait a few seconds, (3) reconnect the Bluetooth adapter into the USB plug, (4) wait a few seconds, (5) repoeat the process if I'm still geting the error message which some people claim is documented somewhere.– User.1Commented Dec 27, 2012 at 17:01
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Oh yeah, forgot, strangest thing. This bluetooth adapter is tiny; almost small enough to balance on your thumbnail. The result is that the thing is hard to pull out of the USB port, in fact physically painful to the fingers. I put in a 4-port hub, and plugged the BlueTooth adapter into that, to reduce the physical pain. The unexpected result of that is that now the Bluetooth adapter is listed on the same USB root hub as another device which is plugged into the back of the computer tower. When using the physical pain approach, the BlueTooth gets its own USB Root hub; which I could disable.– User.1Commented Dec 27, 2012 at 17:16
I have also seen this problem. (Except it said "Your device is ready to use." and simultaneously "Waiting for user input").
I closed it and it worked anyway, which leads me to suspect that the main title is more authorative than the progress text. Clearly a bug in windows either way.
The best way to check if the driver is installed is with UsbView.exe from the Windows SDK tools. If it says "No open pipes" for your device then the driver hasn't been installed correctly.
