Use a phone book to find a Blockbuster and rent Tron on BetaMax.
Ha, sorry, just kidding. Not trying to be snarky.
As someone who has worked for large PC developers and with Microsoft, I hope that everyone really understands the huge cost of supporting legacy hardware in modern systems. I cannot blame Scubapro nor Microsoft for the dwindling and intermittent support for IrDA. The cost in time and money to maintain support for a myriad of old hardware is astronomically high. With so few users requesting such support, they cannot justify spending millions of dollars maintaining and testing all the technology and hardware from 25 years ago.
In fact, you would not want them to try. For Microsoft, maintaining code and support for old hardware would bloat the already enormous footprint of their OS, slow down it's performance on your PC even more, delay the release of new features and updates to a crawl, and leave your personal data and security vulnerable to hackers. For Scubapro, the cost of hardware would go up by 2x or 3x to pay for the ongoing maintenance and certification of drivers.
I know that many here love their older computers with IrDA, and will continue to try to find functional hardware/software combinations to keep them working. It is totally understandable. However, I would caution you to consider the technological and financial costs and (lack of) benefits therein before you demonize hardware and software manufacturers.
*edit* Seems the harsh words were back in 2015 on this thread... sorry for talking about such an old subject when the recent posts were just the friendly sharing of information *end edit*
*edit 2* Not keeping your software updated is a huge security risk. Identity theft is real and happens all the time. Without software patches, your PC is wide open to hackers *end edit 2*