>>I have an app the is used to weigh in trucks on a truck scale. The app has a serial connection to a scale indicator. The app is constantly querying the data feed from the scale indicator so the weight displayed on the monitor looks live just like watching the weight on the indicator. This app has been working well for years but I have a new install running windows 8 using a USB to RS232 cable for communications. This install has been running there since June with no problems until recently and now I am getting errors that MScomm has lost connection. Two weeks ago I seemed to solve the problem by switching USB ports but today the problem came back. I am thinking that either the com port has gone away or MScomm control has crashed. This is very intermittent problem and I am having a tough time trouble shooting it. I was wondering if there is a way to trap the error and unload/reload MScomm?
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>>Thanks.
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>Before you go too far down that road try replacing the USB Serial Adapter. My experience has been that some of them are junk.

I don't recall if the old trick of using the environment variable "devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices" works in Win8 or not. When this environment variable exists and is set to "1", it makes the "show hidden devices" to show inactive devices. I'd often seen situations where once a USB device starts having problems, Windows keeps trying to reinstall the drivers. Sometimes it works, other times it makes a mess of things and you may see a *lot* of "dead" instances. One of the symptoms this might be happening is when you notice that the serial port is COM5 (when it was originally COM1) and you're not able to reconfigure it as you get message that something else is already using that port. If you start seeing this sort of problem, it's often easier to swap out the adaptor with a newer one (one of the issues I'd seen with some of the older ones is the driver might not be compatible with later OSs).