Dang. If a person's not familiar with the ins and outs of USB protocol, I'm going to bet they're not going to be able to think up or through that procedure. At best it'd just be some incantation to recite in the hopes the gizmo comes back to life. And if you're using the FTDI chip specifically because it abstracts away serial to USB communication stuff, well, hopefully the device is cheap enough to just replace.

Still, perhaps it could be automated somehow via a responding Windows Update? That's the thing that gets me - it was autmatically propagated, it oughtta be automatically fixed.

Nice find though.