Finally resolved the USB issue I had with VMware due to the Sony Ericsson driver (seehcri.sys)

Since yesterday, I've been struggling with resolving the issue I had with connecting my USB scanner to my VMware OS. Every time when I booted up my VM, I received a message saying "USB controller initialization failed". So I searched on the Internet hoping to find a clue about what's going on. At first I found nothing specific to the problem I was facing. Then some guy suggested in a forum to use a utility called DebugView (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896647.aspx) during the VM boot process to diagnose the cause of problem (million credits to this guy). Then only from there I found this important clue "seehcri.sys" showing up. Then I continued to google this clue and that's when Sony Ericsson came out on my screen (I installed its software and uninstalled it sometime ago). Damn... this problem almost caused me a heart attack because the first time I realized about it was when I was preparing for a software demo using my VM and the bloody Sony Ericsson driver just stopped my VM from connecting the USB scanner for me! Phew... That was the past nightmare now... I have survived in the end.

And today I continued to search for a solution to this and finally I found the tricks:

1. On my host computer, I could see a Sony Ericsson device listed under the Universal Serial Bus controllers (Control Panel > System > Device Manager) though I had uninstalled my Sony Ericsson program sometime ago.
2. Disabling and uninstalling it would not solve the problem as Windows would detect it again and put back the Sony Ericsson driver in place. So I needed a "total" "annihilation" of this driver.
3. So I uninstalled the Sony Ericsson device first, then I searched my computer (mainly C:\Windows\) for the file "seehcri.sys" and I killed all of them.
4. I restarted my computer after that. Then I found out all my USB root hubs listed in the same place as step no. 1 were having some driver problem and none of them worked!
5. And so lastly I just needed to reinstall the driver for all the USB root hubs one by one, by manually picking up the 2nd USB Root Hub driver from the list when Windows asked me for a signed driver. This was the trickiest part, as you would be presented with 2 signed USB Root Hub drivers, both with the same name! And you could now guess it - the 1st driver was indeed the Sony Ericsson driver (damn you). And if you tried to pick the 1st one to install it would prompt you for the location of the file - "seehcri.sys" (I already deleted all of them from my computer in step no. 3).

So the result? Whoooola! I finally got my USB scanner to work once again in my VM! But my demo was due yesterday :(. Anyway, just thought of posting it here so it might help somebody with the same problem again. Thank you Sony Ericsson... Thank you very much...