>I have commtools. It requires a com port number. Does anyone know how to get this from the user's computer without having to have a control file that has to be maintained?

Look in the FAQ - I posted code that will return the identity of all COM ports available to the MSCOMM32 control; you could use that information to then spin through the available COM ports looking for a modem by sending a control sequence and waiting for a possible modem to respond. There's no guarentee that a modem will be available, that it'll be able to get on line, and you need to know the control sequences for the modem; even if a modem responds, there's no certainty that it's connected to a phone line. The code I posted will reliably locate standard COM ports between 1 and 16 at standard addresses. It's extremely likely that if you find a modem on other than COM1-4, it's going to have customized IRQ and IO port identifiers associated with it, especially with PnP PCI or PC Card (CardBus) modems.

You may want to examine the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Hardware\DEVICEMAP registry hive for information on possible modem devices, whiuch could be in a number of subkeys; the most common one is SERIALCOMM, but others are possible, especially with PC Card/CardBus modems.

If you were not using CommTools, I'd suggest using a TAPI control that handles the issues of identifying available TAPI devices and providing a virtualized interface to the TAPI device, but that might not be what you're looking to do.

In general, writing detailed modem handling in VFP apps is not a very cost-effective approach in most cases; adding a third-party ActiveX control with the required capabilities or accessing another app for the communications such as PCAnywhere32 that has scripting, a high-level view of the comm port, file transfer capabilties and the like is usually a better solution, but it's your app and you've given no indication of what needs to be done.

I have no idea regarding how to do the equivalent using CommTools.

In general, I'd recommend using a configuration file or entries in the registry to specify the modem; you need to know more than just a port ID in the vast majority of cases.