INF error

I discovered that my Windows XP laptop was no longer recognizing my USB-to-serial adapter a week ago. I had been trying to figure out what was causing the problem up until now.

It turns out that the serial enumerator device driver serenum.sys was missing from my C:\WINDOWS\System32\DRIVERS folder. I'm not sure how it went missing, but I extracted the file from my CAB files and replaced it and my adapter is working fine again.

The main symptom of the issue was when trying to install the driver for the device during the 'Add New Hardware Wizard' it would end with an error indicating 'A service installation section in this INF is invalid.'

I finally determined the problem by reading C:\WINDOWS\setupapi.log after a failed install attempt. It indicated that the above serial driver was missing.

I hope that this will be able to help others with similar problems.