SP2 and Com Ports

[Chris A. Kusmierz]

I do a fair amount of work interfacing serial rs232 industrial equipment
with PCs for data collection purposes. With the introduction of WinXP I've
run across a myriad of problems dealing with serial ports.

Everything from XP deciding the serial data from a streaming device is a
pointing device and automatically installing drivers, and thereby
*hijacking* the port, to apparently random *access denied* errors when
trying to access com ports.

I've come to understand XP is intended to control direct hardware access
more than other versions of Windows for security purposes. Fine. I can
accept this.

Question:

Does anybody know what, if any, changes I can expect from SP2 which may
affect serial communications on existing installed applications?

I'm not talking about DOS based legacy programs but VB6 apps developed for
XP systems.

I considered cross posting this to the VB newsgroups, but it does seem a bit
XP centric, and I'm sure it'll come up there eventually, but really I'm not
that fond of cross-posting.

Does anyone know if SP2 has expanded on the concept of restricting direct
access to hardware, such as serial ports?

Any enlightenment would be appreciated.

 

[Nathan McNulty]

Only thing I can suggest is checking out the Release Notes. There are
quite a few crosslinks that may provide what you are looking for:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;835935