I have a USB device that provides additional COM (serial) ports on a Windows PC. When you plug the device into a USB port, your system, thanks to the accompanying driver, thinks you have 8 more COM ports. For developmental reasons, I would like to use the driver without plugging the device in. I would be plugging in a different device to see it they are compatible. Is there a way to force windows to activate the driver without the original device being plugged in?

Also, is there a way to change the device ID that Windows expects for a certain driver in order to determine if it should load it? In other words, I think, correct me if I'm wrong, windows queries the USB device for a device ID, based on that it looks for a driver that matches and loads it. If I could change the ID it's looking for, I could trick it into activating the driver for my other device.

BTW, there is a function you can call in a program written for WindowsCE called ActivateDevice(). Is there a similar function in Windows 7?