It has taken me a while to figure out that you are supposed to program the ESP directly with the arduino IDE rather than the arduino itself, and then communicate between the two via software serial.
So I pulled out my USB to serial converter and attached to the Tx, Rx, Vcc and GND pins of the ESP and then plugged it into the PC.
Initially windows recognized the device and the arduino IDE selected 'Sparkfun ESP8266 Thing' on COM15.
But then windows & popped up a message saying ti couldn't install the device driver and com15 subsequently disappeared.
So my question is.....
Is there some where you can download windows device drivers for these shields?