I want to use a piece of Dell hardware on my laptop in a Oracle VirtualBox Virtual Machine that is running on the laptop.  I am using the OEM Vista OS as the "host machine," and a legal enterprise licensed Vista OS as the "guest" or "virtual machine."  The laptop is a precision M6400, and the hardware is the onboard Broadcom USH fingerprint and smartcard reader.  Virtualbox plumbs the hardware to the VM using USB.  It seems to disconnect the device from the host USB controller, and connect it to the guest controller.  That all works great, but...

When the guest virtual machine sees the USB fingerprint/smartcard reader connect, it can't find any drivers.  I downloaded the appropriate driver from dell: Rsomething.  When I try to run the driver installer, it says I don't have a Dell system, or the system is unsupported.  That makes sense, as the guest virtual machine OS is essentially a retail copy, not an OEM copy.  So how do I use the reader device in the virtual machine?  Every other device manufacturer lets you install the driver irrespective of the computer vendor.  In this case, Broadcom directs you to Dell for support for drivers and such.  Not too bad, but now how do I use that device with the Dell drivers?

I culled over the host OS registry, and found a couple keys that the driver installer might be looking for to verify the OS is from Dell, imported them into the guest OS, but it didn't let me install the driver.  I also found some wizardry in the VirtualBox community site, to modify the BIOS DMI strings that descrobe the hardware vendor.  I set those for the guest OS to the same as the host OS, but again no luck.

I would prefer not faking the guest virtual machine out to think that it is a Dell OEM OS, worse still the same OS as the host for license counting purposes, but I would still like to use all the hardware in the guest virtual machine.

What should I try next?