Mark,

>I would test this myself, but I do not have access to a cash drawer and do not care to spend several hundred dollars for a 5 minute test.

I don't knoe the control well enough to tell you if DoVerb() is the right thing to use. But for testing serial i/o you can hang an old dumb ascii terminal off your serial port, or hook another computer to it and run terminal or CrossTalk (is that even still a product?) to watch what comes out of the port. I've spent lots of time doing this sort of stuff in other projects.