One of the same things I was working on in 2015 as well as 2005.

An HP Deskjet 5850. Typical small home/office printer.

Thanks to a brilliant owner years ago who figured out you can use the drivers from the model 9800. A larger-format printer whose drivers seem to cover a lot of ground for printers of certain vintages, easily including ones like this one having more limited paper size options. The printer works quite well on the latest Windows 11 now, it's just not a one-click affair to install like it was with Windows XP.

By this late date, the driver download has been slightly hosed. Files are basically from Windows Vista x64 but are not prepared to install like you would want them to, there is actual uncorrected damage to the structure. Once you unzip the drivers into a C:\drivers\ folder for instance, then after you manually install the .INF file found in C:\drivers\ it's supposed to allow you to later manually select a driver from among a number of similar vintage HP Deskjets. All the driver files for that variety of different printers are right there in the C:\drivers\ folder, right next to that one INF that covers them all. But the install routine can't find any of them because it looks for them in a "hard-coded" C:\drivers\amd64\ subfolder which somebody forgot to spawn.

Then if you manually make a new C:\drivers\amd64\ folder, place an extra copy of the unzipped fileset into C:\drivers\amd64, then install the INF from there, it proceeds to search for the drivers in C:\drivers\amd64\amd64\ and fails to find them again :\

Try it again, pointing at the INF in C:\drivers\, and with the extra copy of the fileset (less the INF) already present in C:\drivers\amd64, then it works.

And that was before "Print Nightmare" a few years ago.

Since then the "normal" steps that follow have gotten worse every year, maybe more often, additional hurdles and barricades keep popping up.

Plus you can only imagine the fun, sharing the printer with Windows XP like nobody knows the difference.

It's almost like Windows is a challenging videogame which keeps coming out with new versions where it gets more difficult to make it through all the levels, and when you do, you reach pretty much the same final goal you had before you got the new version :\