AHA! Excellent sleuthing!!!

YES: Seeing ESET in that driver list is actually something I understand and that I have a little bit of experience with.

I believe that the ESET driver that you are seeing is something known as a Filter Driver. One of my biggest projects at NetMotion (before I was laid off) was to do a ton of complex QA on a filter driver that we had written for GPS's and WWAN cellular modems.

Clearly the ESET filter driver is trying to monitor communications with external plugged-in devices, and detect if the device is infected with some kind of malware. This is actually quite a good idea in theory, if they were able to do it bug-free. But as you can see, their implementation is not bug-free.

Having worked for a long time with filter drivers, I know that it's quite possible for a filter driver bug to render an entire driver stack unworkable. Our filter driver was very careful to install only on driver stacks that it could work on. However, even in that case, it still needed to implement a whitelist/blacklist to handle the exceptions of the stacks that it interfered with. One thing I will say: You're lucky that it merely rendered your driver unusable. In extreme cases, a filter driver bug can bluescreen your machine badly enough that it won't boot at all, and you have to go remove the entire driver stack in Safe Mode. I guess what I'm saying is, "could be worse".

If ESET has a whitelist/blacklist option to selectively choose which device stacks to monitor (not to be confused with a whitelist/blacklist for particular files or web sites), then your workaround will be in there. Or, potentially, maybe it has a tickybox to say, globally, "don't try to monitor any plugged-in devices" or something. That might also be a workaround.

The real fix will be to notify them that they have a bug in their filter driver which renders your scanner driver stack unusable. If they are good, they will respond to your bug with a fix in an update. Wouldn't hold my breath on that, but it's worth a try.