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i'm at wits end here and was hoping that someone could point me in the correct direction for a f ix

So, the situation, my company maintains a visitor management system for a large hospital that consists of a few devices(Camera, ID scanner, badge printer) connected to domain managed PC's

My issue is that the ID scanners on the desks thru-out the hospital keep randomly breaking in various ways

There are a few issues the keep reoccurring and NOTHING i have done so far has fixed them permanently, i will try to include all attempted fixes and issues below

ISSUES:

-Clamshell type ID scanners refuse to take a calibrate card after a while

-Clamshell type ID scanners refuse to read an ID

-The only way i have been able to fix these for short periods of time has been to completely wipe both the VMS and the SDK for the scanner and do a complete reinstall of the VMS/SDK, this fixes the calibration issue for roughly 2 weeks, at some point the scanner stops taking calibrations and then falls out of calibration and becomes useless

-Assuretech type scanners will not work until service is restarted for each logout/PC restart

-This issue cropped up over a few months, finally resulting in the assuretech service basically never starting correctly the first time, the only way to get the scanner working on startup is to stop and restart the service manually, looking at the log files(that i cannot get to now) the service seems to fail when doing something with the windows TWAIN method/class

-Delaying the startup of the service does nothing

-Restarting the service produces a clean log file (No generic error stack)

-Reinstalling the software/drivers does not seem to help

Assuetech ID Scanners cannot access files nessecary for operation

-This issue is fresh, brand new, and now its on top of all these other issues that are occuring, the customer called and told me that both scanners at the front desk stopped working simultaneously and that the restart procedure failed to get them working

At this point, i am pretty convinced i am battling with some group policys (OR SOMETHING) on this customers network, but as far as i am aware, there has been no generated messages pertaining to group policy interfering with system operation

I would assume that if rules placed on the pc were violated, the programs would simply never work, or at the very least i would get an error message telling me i should not do that

Does anyone have ANY idea what i should start looking at? I believe i have exhausted nearly every option available to me, and unfortunately i cannot bench a non-domain controlled PC at these desks to rule out other issues. No fix i throw at these things seems to stick and my customer and company have probably spent well over 100 hours at this point throwing darts at the situation and trying to wish it away to no avail

Signod
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    Have you considered that the hardware and/or software may just, in fact, be unusably buggy? – womble Aug 23 '16 at 05:15
  • As someone who has to deal with horrible hospital IT policies on a daily basis, I can tell you that it's *possible* that lame-brained and ridiculously restrictive group policies or the like can create these types of symptoms, but as someone who's dealt with a lot of niche hardware/software in his day, it's much more **likely** that the devices or their software is just crap. The folks I work for deal with a lot of hospitals, and really the only way to figure out the problem is to work with the hospital IT department to test and troubleshoot in their environment. – HopelessN00b Aug 23 '16 at 13:38
  • The though crossed my mind, but they have nearly 13 of these things having nearly identical issues across the whole hospital, and the issues do not follow the physical devices, not only that but the manufacturer seems baffled, and the issues dont seem to happen for a decidable reason – Signod Aug 24 '16 at 20:47

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