Brian,

I concur with Doug's (VK2XLJ) statement with recent experience with the same issue.

Before Christmas, the workstation I used for programming was working fine. This workstation is Windows 10, but is generally only used for radio Ham related work / logging / etc, so nothing new had been installed (other than a major Windows update coming through)

In February, I ran into USB driver hell with both the Chirp Software and the DMR software, both not working correctly with the comm port. I was fortunate here with both apps not working, and using different methods/drivers of using the USB ports, it gave me a clue that a Windows update had clobbered the driver. I believe it was the last major Windows 10 update (not one of the smaller patch Tuesday updates)

Main thing was to locate the remove the broken driver, various reboots and re-installing the original working driver(s) - once I did this software was working again, but it was several hours that I won't get back.

Now it is very possible these drivers may be poorly written, or they are not being kept up to date with Microsoft's security or framework requirements (remember many of these drivers hail from 2018 or earlier), so it may not just be Microsoft's fault, but this sort of issue is pushing more and more people to setup Linux PC's for this sort of work.

Regards

Bob

(VK1ED)