I believe I need some work on my writing skills. I'll try detailing this a bit more.
Computer one, my computer and the one I want to run odin on.
This is an older dell, not ancient pentium 4 win xp, just before playing around with this I did a reset of the computer formatting the main hard drive and reinstalling windows and doing all the win updates. before formatting computer I had only connected my phone non debugging as mass storage and never had a issue but never played with any of the development or debugging stuff. Still had, and have, way to much reading to do. So after my computers rebirth I go and install the samsung device drivers, this was an interesting process. So there are like six things that need to install apparently all popping up in bubbles on the computers notification bar. It installs the first bubble or two above the windows task bar then just hung. After waiting I pull the cable and the bubble changes, it looks like the next component installed then gave a bubble on how the device didn't finish installing. After doing this a few more times and it doing the same thing on each I went to reading and googlin and found something on installing the java sdk (software development kit) so I installed that and it seemed to work. In debugging mode it now came up as a flash card reader, I could mount the sd card and play with it just like mass storage. Went to xda did super user one click clockwork and it worked. at this point running on eb13 update.zip method, stock rooted.
Then I go to start playing with roms, but because I read before I leap I knew I wanted to be able to fix it should I soft brick it. I download odin and the froyo update tool. Loaded odin booted into digger (download mode, 1 plus power boot) plugged into usb and got the notification bubble (on computer) that the device is malfunctioning. I get this every time I connect with digger, samsung install tool same thing. The status bar at the bottom of each program showed no sings of detecting my phone. I've tried both my cables all kinds of connection orders, debugging on/off, allow unknown sources on/off, and nothing.
computer two, my buddies newer dell. He snuck a copy of windows 7 on their,32 bit. Installed drivers, plugged in as non debug mass storage fine. Copied samsung froyo install tool just fine and disconnected. Turned on debug and his computer started being goofy doing stuff like mine earlier. Did weird things to the usb ports, lost the mouse for a minute, rebooted got it back tried again got it working in debug. Followed sammys install instructions, booted into digger, and when I plugged in, same message as my computer, malfunctioning device. Tried different usb slots and both cables.
Computer three. Brothers win xp laptop. using my two samsung cables because his cable I went thee to use didn't fit. Install drivers, phone connects, copy sammys install tool to computer, boot to digger. Worked fine, flashed eb13 stock, did one click ext4, installed srf (syndicate rom frozen) 1.0.1 to phone and was happy. 1.0.2 came and that of course was easy. And am still happy with srf 1.0.2.
Computer four, hp laptop, win vista, didn't expect it to work and it didn't. Same stuff and malfunctioning device pop up.