CrossRoads:
Sounds like your clone may not have a bootloader installed. Need that to talk to the PC during serial downloading.
Hmm. I can't do that (can I?) if the Mini isn't connecting with IDE to burn a bootloader, though.
My two best guesses on this were (1) that the adapter wasn't doing any I/O from the Mini, so it wasn't showing up in, or being scanned by, Windows -- so Windows never saw it to fail-out and requested a driver...or (2) there was a missing bootloader. I wasn't sure if a missing bootloader would keep the device from even being recognized as having been inserted, though.