In general, I fully agree with you! It seems that P&P and printers don't get
along when it comes to the original driver install. (Scanners can be worse!)
A quibble is that when the drivers install then uninstall (or some app
software for that matter) in the same install cycle, the installer is seeing
something that causes it to continue to the uninstall section.
In January 09, I went through this with my fully updated and stable XP
desktop. Seems that the auto uninstall process did not clean out the
registry properly. The install error log showed errors that were not
documented very well. The next attempt at installing would actually install
the software, then decide that since it was not set to overwrite the
appropriate existing registry entries, immediately jump into the uninstall
sequence, which did not remove them either.
Aborting the install process showed that the drivers and some printer
related apps actually installed, and would at least partially function.
Further research (which I did not do) might disclose that the installers
default behavior was changed somewhat recently (SP-3?), and this kind of
problem might be a result. So far, I've run across this sort of issue with
more than one printer vendor's drivers (win XP), and a current version of a
popular and well thought of backup software application (in Vista (again
fully updated), no less)