Ahh jeez, Da Nag - and from a remote location to boot! You have my admiration for perseverance...
I recently decided to put a couple of upgraded PC's into my ham radio contesting station (quick, hit me across the head Larry, nyuck, nyuck)... It had been a long enough time that i had forgotten the pain of rebuilding the network the last time I did this... The contesting software is N1MM and a Cisco Router with hardwire connections... Right now I have one computer out of five (Shack 1, 198.162.0.3) that just flat refuses to see the handshakes on data stream from the USB to Serial driver to an electronic morse code keyer... As I remember I ran into this before, about 5 years ago, and I do not for the life of me remember how I solved it... aaargggh Maybe I will just put the old PC's back into place...
Long, long ago in a Galaxy far, far away (Late 1960's) I was in charge of a computer driven overhead storage system that had miles of I-beam track with powered and free carriers that brought the parts down the final assembly line for an auto plant... Whenever this system went down GM was losing an ungodly number of thousands of dollars a minute...
In those days BPC (before PC's) the computer room was a temple, with large tape drives that jerked like St. Vitus dance, and large teletypes that told you what the system was doing by printing it out on 3 foot wide wide paper on rolls - no video screens, no GUI, no Windoze... All at a pleasant 68 degrees under blinding fluorescent lighting..
I had this programmer, Jerry, who was a bearded ex-hippie geek from California (the land of fruit and nuts) who had been brought down to the Pits of Hades (better known as a JOB) by financial necessity... To say that Jerry was different was a vast under statement...
This scenario was played out many times...
A large, revolving red light would start flashing, high up on a wall of the plant signifying that the Power-And-Free conveyor system was DOWN (panic time)... I would watch it for maybe 30 seconds and if it did not go out by then a klaxon horn would start blasting away... At this point I would walk/hustle to the "Computer Room" (big, white cab up on stilts in the center of the plant), climb the steel stairs, and go in...
There would be Jerry, hunched over the keyboard of the Teletype, with his fingers gnarled into his beard...
"Jerry, the Power and Free is down." I would say...
"I know.", was always the reply...
"Why?"
"I don't think it likes me.", would be the plaintive answer, always in a whisper...
"Jerry, I don't dare if it hates your guts... Bring it back up."
"Oh, OK." and then he would carefully, with one finger, type in a long string of hexadecimal numbers and finally press the RETURN key - and with a loud clang and bang hundreds of carriers would suddenly flip out their fingers and grab onto the constantly running chain drive and be gated out from the free tracks (think sidings like on a rail road) and start rolling along the power tracks heading for the proper elevator drops to the workers on the lines below...... (we fervently hoped they were going to the proper drops or that pickup was going to have a red fender on the Left and a green fender on the right - and be perfectly equipped for cruising the river, or maybe for powering a raft from Cuba)
denny-o
but know something about oxygen deprivation, and it does have some rather disastrous effects. :thdown :bat :unlove :rose2 
