William Sommerwerck wrote:

I apologize for my sloppy writing. I meant "provide a systematic solution".

When I upgraded to a new computer, I found that even the adapters from
reputable companies would not work. The result was that I had to replace three
serial devices with USB equivalents. (Yes, the adapters were correctly
installed.)

I've never seen that happen.

The //apparent// reason is that they only work with software that //directly//
addresses the serial port. Stick a driver in there, and all bets are off.

I would think it would be quite the opposite. The driver causes the port
to appear as a device file, and software that just opens up the device file
and writes to it will be fine.

If you need the device to be COM1: because that is what is hardcoded into
badly-written software, it's possible to do some device mapping to make the
USB device show up under a different name.

The problems would occur when software attempts to talk to the device
directly, which I _hope_ no Windows code would ever do. Old DOS code did a
lot of that, but Windows 95 finally brought I/O management into the 1970s
and removed any benefits to that kind of stuff.
--scott
--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."