"The parameter is incorrect"

[stereophonie]

I'm ready to go postal with this PC. A friend asked if I could install his wifi adapter for him as he was having trouble. It's a generic Dell Desktop with an AMD CPU an 4GB RAM. The specs aren't terribly important, when installing ANY wireless dongle the driver install fails and tells me "The parameter is incorrect". Tried three different dongles. I'm at my wits end I've tried everything I can think of, has anyone came across this problem before?

[Toddwjp]

go to the manufacturer website, download the driver software and install it manually. then bitch about windows being retarded

[stereophonie]

I've done all that, tried many different drivers, it's on Windows 7 x86. The correct driver is being installed it just won't work.

[stereophonie]

I read online it could be an antivirus so I completely removed all antivirus and tried that. Tried showing all hidden devices under network adapters and removing them, that didn't work. Tried everything is safe mode, that didn't work. Tried resetting all network logs and settings through cmd and that didn't work. I'm now running a system files check. Nothing seems to work though, I always get the same error.