>The no-connection I understand. Radically incompatible speeds can do this
>(ie Zoomer at 19200 and PC at 2400). But in cases where the speeds were
>the same, I was getting garbage. The commands were going to the Zoomer,
>since I could see, for example, a dir listing on it. However, what came
>back to the PC was strange. It looked like the junk you get when you have
>a close-but-not-right baud rate on a terminal. For example, 9600 talking
>to 19200. You know, some chars right, others dropped or bit-foo'd.
>I tried different variants on stop bit, parity, data size, with no
>success.
I solved this problem last night. It was the dreaded IRQ Conflict on my home
PC. I've got a Logitech Bus Mouse that can use IRQ 2, 3, 4, or 5. 2 is used
by my video card, 3 by COM2 (modem), 4 by the BusMouse, and 5 by SoundBlaster.
The only com ports I've got available are COM1 (with Zoomer-cable-compatible
connector) and COM3 (different connector). Both use, you guessed it, IRQ4. So
when I tried to talk to the Zoomer via COM1, I was getting some weirdness from
the mouse.
Moved Soundblaster to IRQ10, moved the Mouse to IRQ5, and left COM1 at IRQ4.
Everything's fine.
Hope this helps anyone else who might have similar troubles.
---
Rob Freundlich, Senior Software Engineer | "males are biologically driven
IDX Systems Corporation | to go out and hunt giraffes"
| - Newt Gingrich
"Some folks you don't have to satirize, you just quote em" - Tom Paxton