I have been in contact with another IIS member, RickS, who has kindly written a script program that removes the mystery COM port characters (ie: COM6i; COM6o; COM6O etc) we sometimes see when using MS Bluetooth Stack software.
These "
extra characters" muck up the COM port numbers and make them unusable unless you edit the port numbers in the registry, refer to my pdf on this (in project section), or use a 3rd party BT stack software like Toshiba BT stack or Bluesoeil.
Now, an easier method for those using MS BT stack is available, run this script prior to trying to connect to the port.
What it does is clean the registry COM ports of these unwanted extra characters and the COM ports are usable till next system (Computer) re-boot.
So here it is. I've run it extensively and so has Rick so we are putting this up for anyone to use. If it works out as planed we will add this to the project software.
Attached is a screen grab showing the fix to COM ports. This was on a win7 64 bit machine but will work with 32 bit XP and vista.
Attached is the program in zipped format. Please unzip to run. A big thanks to Rick for providing this.