Why won’t digital camera driver upgrade?

I have an old cheapie digital camera, given as an incentive for joining a dial-up service for six months. Cheap, but it’s always worked very well. I’ve recently upgraded my system to Win XP Pro. Went to the website of the manufacturer and downloaded the Win XP driver upgrade [which requires uninstalling the previous driver and then running a cleanup software to remove references to the previous driver from the Registry]. I’ve followed the instructions to the letter, several times, and the system still doesn’t recognize the camera is present. Any ideas? Thanx