sterretje:
No idea what you're ranting about.
Well, son, you haven't been paying attention. 
Only point is that there is NO Arduino with a CH340 chip, so there is no need for Arduino to support it.
The CH340 never entered into it.
That's the real punchline here:
There was never any actual problem! Not with the drivers, not with anything (except maybe sorting out that monkey dance with the Mini's reset button being synchronized with the Upload command, which I'm still working on).
Everything was really working Plug 'n' Play pretty much perfectly on the first try.
The PROBLEM was that it was behaving in Win7 absolutely NOTHING like that harebrained tutorial said it should, especially on the Mini. I'm beating my brains out trying to go through these steps that simply don't work and have nothing to do with the function of these devices in Win7.
If I would have never encountered that tutorial, I never would have had any trouble.
I burned up a man-day or two desperately struggling to fix something that wasn't broke.
Go ahead, laugh your ass off. I'll wait. Someone should get some entertainment out of this, even if I didn't.
most Arduinos (and the clones) come with blink pre-loaded
This is actually the most useful information so far, as that Mini blinked from the first moment I plugged it in, which indicates it is bootloaded and working after all. Right?
simple test to see if uploads work is to modify the blink to be faster/slower or with a asymmetrical on time and off time and see if that works.
Yeah, I quickly worked that one out with the second batch of devices. I'm sure that if I get the RESET/Upload thing worked out with the Mini, it'll go fine, too.
Thanks for this!