USB Bootloader activity on Windows

[xsacha]

Accessing the bootloader requires low-level access to the device in service mode when the device is turned off. However, the official USB drivers intercept these commands. On Mac OSX this is solved by uninstalling the official drivers.

On Windows, however, you are not able to communicate without a driver. The driver system is fairly complicated and annoying. Unsigned drivers are not allowed to be used on modern Windows. Even with unsigned drivers, you would need to remove the official driver first which no user would want to do as it prevents storage access only on Windows.
So, the alternative is a different communication method specifically for Windows (or machines with official drivers). It won't be as feature packed as the *nix version, but will allow most commands. The idea is to talk to the official USB driver using its ABI instead of talking to the device directly.