Yeah, the good news is I got the USB working but my frustration with this thing continues, See Multiple Issues Trying to get First Photon Connected for my continued travails.
As far as what I did to get the USB working, after I copied the files I did do a Re-install driver and not Update driver, and I did do a Browse for the Photon USB driver to where I had unzipped it.
Through trial and error and reviewing the SetupAPI and SetupAPIDev logs I figured the setup behavior (code flow) was different in that the the Update Driver way of doing it would not work correctly i.e. it would not find usbser and serenum files correctly I seem to recall.
When a device is first installed, a directory is created in c:\windows\system32\driverstore\filerepository\ and all the driver’s files are copied there, so a subsequent re-install will retrieve the files from there. So when I copied the files and did a re-install, it picked up the files correctly from there where I copied them. I believe the Update driver will behave similarly to an original Install process (in that it will look for the driver files in the c:\windows\inf directory) and fail. So by doing the Install process first, and letting it fail with “can’t find file” or whatever the message was, and then copying the drivers from the c:\windows\system32\drivers to the c:\windows\system32\driverstore\filerepository\photon.inf_“whatever” directory and doing a re-install got it working for me.
Maybe copying the files to c:\windows\inf might have worked for the Install or Update process but I didn’t want driver files in a location they shouldn’t be.
These are my recollections of a pretty messy affair, but if you or someone else with this issue (on Vista or any other version of windows should it be the same issue) wants to test this, I’d recommend turning on the setup api loglevel to it’s most verbose level. See here https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/ff550845(v=vs.85).aspx