I got such a kick out of this (and this could be a good way to re-use old hardware with propietary drivers). The author couldn’t get a system running of USB/serial in windows. So he created a tiny linux VM, had it monitor the usb device and pipe the results to netcat back to the windows box. Its a heck of a hack, but it got me thinking about a bunch of old devices I have that lost support after Windows XP.
http://hackaday.com/2015/08/04/no-windows-drivers-boot-up-a-linux-vm/