[nttdemented]

I haven't been hit by this but it makes sense that this is simply a driver issue. Try connecting your phone and let the OS do whatever detection process it wants to go through. Then go into Device Manager and find the devices that the phone installs (keep an eye out for them when you plug in the phone) and uinstall all these drivers entirely. Restart and plug your phone back in after rebooting with a live internet connection. Should connect automatically to Windows Update and download what is necesarry. Its worked like that in Vista and Windows 7 for me, when I connected my phone for the first time in Windows 7 I pulled up the status info of the driver installation process that pops up in the notification area and it was clearly detecting and downloading everything it needed on its own.

If you want to get really technical, take note of these drivers before uninstalling and look for the DLL's in the dllcache folder in C:\Windows\System32 and after uinstalling from device manager go into safe mode and look for the DLLs and remove them manually as to prevent the OS from just going into the local cache to install drivers for the phone, forcing the OS to go search to Windows Update like it should.