Welcome to ecomodder,
Wow, they just clone elm 327s and put a big "elm 327" label on the box? That's not too cool.
re vista, work just sent me a new laptop and I had them upgrade it to xp (from vista). The folks who didn't are all complaining of one thing or another. My guess is vista IS the problem.
At home I use ubuntu,
Ubuntu Home Page | Ubuntu no usb problems (or serial or parallel port problems) to speak of, works better than xp in that regard in my experience, and is free (though donations always welcome)