At the outset I know that this thread may not be appropriate for this forum. I have searched for this information all over and have drawn a blank. I am hoping that some thread member will be able to either help or give me some links to look up.

We have this application in foxpro that needs to access the COM ports to open a Till( as in a POS system). It works fine when run locally. Unfortunately, it has been deployed on Win2K and users access it using an RDP session - Run MSTSC and connect to a remote session on the server to run the app.

Earlier when we used to use Citrix we were able to redirect the COM ports so that the application even when run remotely, could access the local COM port.

I have been told by my network guy that COM port redirection is currently NOT possible in RDP. I have managed to find that by installing a Generic/Text printer driver on the server, and printing to that port, I am able to redirect output to the local COM port(local computer's port)

Unfortunately this is very slow and output finally reached the local port from the server after a delay of 15 to 20 secs. While setting up the printer as instructed, I was able to select a local port to send output to. These are virtual ports, but I cannot access them from anywhere else in Win2K.

In Citrix all I did was map the Local port COM1 to Server port COM5 and my app would send output to COM5 which would be redirected to the local port COM1.

With Win2K TerminalServices using RDP v5 this seems impossible. We have RDP Client v5.1 which allows local Port Mapping, but Win2K will not allow any mapping except in the printer setup dialog.

Is there any way to accomplish this? Is there a service pack or external tool that will allow this?

Thanks

BErnard