Serial Port Problem

From: Altman (NotGiven_at_SickOfSpam.com)
Date: 09/15/04 

Date: Wed, 15 Sep 2004 15:49:31 -0500

I am trying to get an old strain guage that worked with a program written in
DOS to work with a Windows program written in VB. I tried using
MSCOMM32.ocx to communicate with the strain guage throught the serial port
but had problems. I then tried to get it to work in hyperterminal and that
didn't work. After alot of hours and many headaches I found that it works
on Win 98 Hyperterminal but not XP hyperterminal. Furthermore we tested
communications by putting a 98 machine to listen on the serial line and
found that the XP machine WAS sending out the correct data, and the Strain
Guage was receiving it and sending back the correct data. The 98 machine
was able to read the data coming back from the guage but the XP machine
could not. We tried this on 3 different XP machines and 2 different strain
gauges and got the same result. Has there been any changes to how the
serial port is handled in XP versus 98? I cannot find any documentation for
anybody else with this problem. Has anybody else had problems converting a
serial device from 98 to XP?