Thanks for the information. We were also able to extract more information on Vista incompatibility, including some based on Frets on Fire and some based on the wrong detection of the device as a USB headset. ^_^

Ah sweet! I was pretty thrilled that it was picked up as a controller - it makes sense that it could also be seen as a headset though too... great to hear that it can be worked out if it is (especially because the same thing should happen for those PC's with a standard 360 controller!).

what is the purpose of the 360 guitar hero controller on your computer?

Frets on Fire. It's a game that is very much like GH on the PC. Also, the Halo 2 for Vista team actually tried playing H2 with the controller which was a riot!

is there a way to use it on xp

It should - if the regular 360 controller works on XP (which I'm 99% sure it does) then this should as well.

Argh. I've been searching everywhere on how to get the 360 guitar controller to work in vista. You seem to be the only one who has accomplished it. Could yo give any details on how you did it? I need to know!

Uh, I plugged it in. I mean, that was it. One thing you can also do is get the most recent DirectX drivers... but I dunno why it wouldn't work there.

help :(
my x-plorer plugs in and opens up the found new hardware window, where it wants me to select what to install it with and is not recognized in the game controllers panel

See the above. Also, I had plugged in a wired Xbox 360 Controller into the PC at one point or another... that too may have brought down an extra driver.

It also works with a Windows XP based computer.

Hey, now I got my x-plorer. I wanna use it in xp, but my xp cant find the drivers, argh. Help plz :P

Try getting the most up to date DirectX drivers and/or XInput drivers:

DirectX: http://msdn.microsoft.com/xna

XInput: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=0e989b12-576b-42f2-b7c1-2a17ce25188b&DisplayLang=en

I tried downloading the Xinput driver, but it keeps giving me an error message in the instalation. What do I do?

^ I also got the same message, what can I do?

http://files.filefront.com/Xbox360+32Engexe/;7861313;/fileinfo.html

I found this program called Xbox360_32Eng.exe. Now it recognizes my X-plorer USB guitar as an xBox controller and will automatically add itself to Game Controllers option.

Hope this alternative also helps...

I got the xbox360 controller driver from Microsoft, loaded Frets on Fire, plugged in the guitar (which auto loaded drivers) and had to calibrate it through the Frets on Fire controller menu before it recognized it. The game controller part of Control Panel had neck buttons 3 and 4 reversed, but I was able to assign the pads properly through the FoF Key Settings screen. It would be nice if I could select the Bass, but the fof guitar riffs are good enough for practice.