Sounds like you're between a rock and a hard place. The only other thing that comes to mind is finding a replacement for Windows Generic Text driver that plays nicer with the port - meaning opens it for shared access. You might try http://www.stg.com/textprint/index.html and see if it operates any differently.

>Thanks for the suggestion. We have receipt printing, cash drawer opening, and receipt cutoff all working fine. The problem is that I have a customer who wants to have us query whether the cash drawer is open or not for certain operations. We are not using OPOS because a majority of our customers are using older TM85 printers, and I don't think they work with OPOS (at least the OPOS utility does not have any options for configuring them.)
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>I have code that works to get the open/close status using mscomm.ocx, but if there is a printer driver assigned to the port (which there alway is so we can print, cut, open drawer, etc.) then I can't open the port with mscomm.ocx.
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>I'll try some testing with the TM88 legacy driver and see if it does the same thing.
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>Thanks for you help.
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>>See if Serial Print Fast & Open Drawer helps - about 2/3 down the page. Are you using the OPOS drivers?