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Drivers have a priority field 0-255. Vendor drivers can only use 128-255. System drivers start at 255 baseline. Highest priority (0 is highest) always wins, and ties are broken with version or date comparison or what-have-you.

Disclaimer: near zero forethought

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> keeping in mind you are not allowed to touch the vendor driver's binaries in any way

Default to 192 if an explicit priority is not set.

What's certain to happen is all vendors setting all of their drivers to the highest priority possible, all the time.

If a vendor were sure that this version of a driver will be the last they ever issue, they could do that. That seems a fairly rare circumstance.

They'd be shooting themselves in the foot doing that. They could never override their own code.

Right, the system baseline (255) starts well below the vendor's max priority (128). The vendor would start at 254 presumably, and overeager vendors wanting to start at 128 would only harm themselves (in terms of future flexibility).

When MS needs to supersede the vendor driver, they can issue priority 253 (i.e. vendor + 1) graciously or 127 violently. They can also retract the 127 driver or overwrite its priority back to 255 when appropriate.

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