Do you know where I might find this driver (from title)? There is a GDAL page for drv_shapefile, and maybe even find c++ source, but I was hoping not to build the entire package from scratch.
I decided to try gdal_contour, but apparently need the shapefile drive... the package for Windows doesn't seem to have anything but exe files, and I really can't tell if the drivers are embedded in one of those. I don't even know what extension I'm looking for. I just spent about an hour cruising the web for a pre-made version of the driver package for windows.
gdal file drivers are not drivers in the same sense as windows device drivers. They are pieces of code that know how to understand a specific file format. If you've downloaded the full pre-built gdal package, it's in there buried in a dll. Just try running gdal_contour. If you're still having problems, give us the error messages.
I figured that out -- looked at the source, and realized that they were complied into the executable. I just got a newer distribution, and made a map directly via gdal_contour, by creating shapefiles for the major and minor contours. The result is interesting -- I'll compare this new map with that made by dem2topo. I've just started exploring gdal_demo, so I don't know which options exist to smooth the contours, etc.
A bad thing about gdal_contour: it leaves blocky angular lines at the finest scale (no smoothing for contours, so it seems -- so far). The good thing: you can directly handle much larger maps than you could by dem2topo -- a 10812x10812 geotiff, for example.