Although it is out of my degree of expertise, I tend to agree with these conclusions.
Indeed, if I look with the windows "event manager" to the precise date/hour/minute of the installation, there is a report of a problem. A guess is that the plug and play program agrees to install COM3, but crashes at some point later, possibly because of insufficient permissions or signatures. With windows DLL I cannot either change the baud rate and so on.
I can get the identity of the chip with windows "device manager" / properties / event, and then I get the parameter USB\VID_XXXX&PID_XXXX.
Then with the database
https://www.the-sz.com/products/usbid/
I have the precise manufacturer brand and chip ID. It does not look like a bad chip. I don’t know the kind of layer that the instrument manufacturer builds on the manufacturer... it’s not my job to dive into that.
I am not sure that the plug and play instrument does even try to install a .inf file.
