Re: "They [the drivers and MMC] don't ALWAYS have to match."
No they do not, not always.
The driver is, well .... the driver.
MMC is mostly, basically, just an applications program (Like word or
excel), but it has low-level hooks into the driver.
It certainly is true that some newer versions of MMC won't work with
some older versions of the driver. But at the same time, different
versions of MMC will, in many cases, work with several versions of the
drivers (and in particular with newer versions of the driver). The
problem is you can only find out if an unmatched version of the driver
and MMC are compatible by testing, and even then you could miss an
incompatability on casual testing that might "bite you" at some later time.
But it's extreme to say absolutely that they always have to match,
period. That is the safest and most conservative approach to take, but
it's not always and absolutely necessary.