Getting Sansa to work on Vista

Well I'm not 100% sure of what happened, all I know is that it's working now with Sansa Media Converter, which is funny because the guys from Sandisk told me it wouldn't work on Vista.. I hope they do some more research or hire me :)

I have the Sansa e270 but I think this should work with all versions. Now, on MSC mode it works as a flash card pretty much... You can copy copy and paste your songs into the music folder.. the problem is when you want to transfer pictures and movies to it. MSC won't work on Sansa Media Converter... for this you have to change the USB mode to MTP.
To do so, go to Settings -> USB Mode -> Switch to MTP if not in there... this is the mode that Sansa Media Converter will detect (after you follow the next steps).

First I installed Sansa Media Converter, that's for sure, the version I installed came on the CD and it's 1.2.1.74. And it wouldn't detect my player. Nor in MSC or MTP mode. BTW make sure you don't loose your CD because SanDisk doesn't provide Sansa Media Converter on their website... or at least I couldn't find it... Provably getting the newer version from ArcSoft will save you some time, but I didn't have to do that, and I saved myself about $30 just by browsing around the web, so I hope this guide helps you.

I also installed the Sansa Firmware Updater, which I don't know if it came with the CD or not... but you can get it here. But I didn't update the firmware. I updated it afterwards. (To update you'll need to be on MSC mode). It works with the firmware update too so don't be afraid to do it.

Anyway... I did two more things, the first was that I did what this guy said:
"OK. So far I like Vista and I have had no software or hardware issues, except for my e270.

I have been trying to get my Sansa to work with Vista for a week now (it still works fine with XP.) I would plug it it and the driver installation would pop up, but it would fail to find the drivers. The e270 would show up in device manager (twice, since I have a microSD card in it) under Other Devices, and would have the yellow exclamation point declaring that there was a driver problem.

I recently had a problem installing Daemon-Tools. The virtual CD-ROMs weren't showing up in explorer, even though device manager showed them as being installed.

After some research in the Daemon-Tools forums I found the solution to fix the virtual drives. I turned off all Daemon-Tools virtual drives, deleted "c:\windows\inf\infcache.1", and turned the virtual drives back on. They got reinstalled, and they are working fine now.

I just plugged in my Sansa, and now Windows installed the drivers without any errors. Woo-hoo!

Note: I have read that infcache.1 should be safe to delete, as it is just a cache file. However, I take no responsibility if it screws anything up." unknownsoldierX from Anything But iPod forums.

And either that or the following made it work:

I installed RiverPast Crazi Video for Sansa...
Info here about that program
and you can download a trial here

Try to restart your system, the Sansa, unplug it and plug it back in if Media Converter still doesn't see it. But this should work.

Since I'm not sure which solution did it... And I don't want to try it again... Please leave a comment if you read this on what exactly did you do.. Help some other people out... That's what I'm trying here... :)

I also don't remember the order I followed... sorry I can't be more specific but if you are trying to get your Sansa to work on Vista this will provably work... It's working for me and I really hope you can get it to work on Vista too.