While updating Windows XP on one of my computers I couldn’t get any of the hardware drivers to install or update properly. All tries have ended with error:
An error occurred during the installation of the device. The system cannot find the file specified.
The solution was to go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion
and check if the RunOnce registry key exists. For some reason this key was missing – it was renamed to RunOnceEx. After recreating key RunOnce in the above registry tree all the driver installations afterwards were successfull.