Raymond Chen's blog has an interesting look at companies trying to bypass
Windows XP's checks that a driver has been WHQL-certified:
My favorite stunt was related to my by a colleague who was installing a
video card driver whose setup program displayed a dialog that read, roughly,
After clicking OK, do not touch your keyboard or mouse while we prepare
your system. After you click OK, the setup program proceeds to move the
mouse programmatically all over the screen, opening the Display control
panel, clicking on the Advanced button, clicking through various other
configuration dialogs, a flurry of activity for what seems like a half a
minute. When faced with a setup program that does this, your natural
reaction is to scream, Aaaigh!
There are many more examples (in followup comments and links) of vendors
cheating in the certification and install process:
my new Dell laptop came with an usigned bluetooth driver whose setup
automatically clicks on the Continue button of the dialogs while installing
the driver
the driver for a USB memory key [...] would install and auto-push the button
on that warning dialog. XP SP2 added a new check for kernel memory pool
corruption and guess what? This driver would blue-screen every time the
memory key was plugged in.
I work on a wifi product that sometimes is bundled with wifi cards. When
packaged like that our installer also installs the wifi card dirver. Guess
what. The suits are all upset about the unsigned driver warning, and they
are sure that a programmer more clever than me could make them go away. Of
course actually getting the drivers certified is too expensive. Excuse me
while I get back to work on my TPS report.
I still remember one of Linksys's Wireless B PCMCIA cards. I went to install
the driver, the instructions actually said something to the tune of Ignore
this warning box, it doesn't mean anything important. Continue clicking OK
on every screen until the driver finishes installing. Hell I could have put
a box in that said Click here to format your hard drive and I'm sure some
end users would have clicked OK. Cisco is a huge company, surely the WHQL
payment isn't much to them.
At a company I used to work for they had found away around that dialog box.
They would silently launch the System Properties / Driver Signing Options
dialog, send windows messages to select Ignore and then click ok,
effectively turning off the dialog box (BTW, the code to re-enable the
setting was commented out, so the installer made your machine less secure
forever -- great stuff coming from a security company).
More details at
http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2005/08/16/452141.aspx.
The best suggestion is that the warning be changed to:
Warning! Your hardware manufacturer hasn't bothered to test this driver!
Do you feel lucky?
[Yes] [No]
Peter.
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