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Bought this USB to Parallel cable, so I could plug my printer in again. I'm running Win 7 Home Edition, 64 bit.
Anyway, when I first plugged it in, I got it described as an "ieee-1284 Unspecified Device". As I was expecting the computer to instead notice the presence of the printer, install it, and all done, I started fiddling to see how I could get it to notice the printer. Yeah, I fucked up, as I found out later it's supposed to be an "ieee-1284 Unspecified Device", and I then install the printer and tell it to use the virtual port.

However, my fiddling did have some result. I'm now being told the cable isn't recognised, that the USB device isn't working, and it's a totally unknown device. Take it away and toss it in the bin, it's fucked.
However the thing works just fine in my son's computer (as an "ieee-1284 Unspecified Device"), and it runs the printer just fine. (Before you suggest it, if leaving my printer plugged into my son's computer was an acceptable long-term solution, I would have just done that and not bothered with the adapter cable, as he has a parallel port. No. Not acceptable long-term.)

I've switched the computer off and back on again, plugged and unplugged the USB, 'Restored' the computer to the previous day, even tried uninstalling the driver in the hope it would re-install correctly. I was going to re-install windows, until I read in Help it would wipe all my other files and programs (when did they make doing that so difficult? You used to just re-install over the top of the old installation, and your non-windows stuff would be untouched), so I figured I'd put that off a bit.

The printer's a Brother HL-1240. Win 7 comes with drivers for it.
The boy's computer has Win 7 Professional.

Was your boy's computer 32 or 64 bit?

64 bit OS

Shouldn't have to reinstall windows. Might just try clearing out the cached drivers or trying a different USB port.

What model USB > Parallel adapter do you have? I haven't touched one in years since leaving IT, but I've never had anything but problems with them. I've found almost any model of Print Server, either wired or wireless, works 100 times better. "virtual printing ports" were a huge bane of my existence in IT. There were so many shitty ones out there in the early 2000s.

I tried different USB ports...
Fuck. A back USB actually works (I was trying the front ones before. Easy access). It's identified it correctly, but has failed to download the device driver software. Troubleshoot - fail. Troubleshoot - installed drivers correctly!
And the damn printer even prints. It's had me stuck for days.

You're a genius, Borgholio.

Fenix, an Ebay cheap one. I figure things like that are so cheap, they're worth a gamble.

Issue is probably that the front ports are connected via an internal hub to the motherboard, back ports are likely hard-soldered to it. That can make a difference.