[FarmerBen]

I'm hoping someone can give me a few tips as I'm bruising my forehead bashing it against the table.

I'm trying to get guiding working for my LX200GPS with PHD on a virtual windows machine that's running on an OS X host.

Why? well that's a long story. I want to use an Orion Starshoot Autoguider (relatively cheap) but this will only work with windows. PHD Guiding supports this camera on windows. PHD Guiding also supports my telescope using ASCOM drivers on windows. So... it all seemed so simple.. I've set up a virtual windows XPsp2 machine with Parallels, I have installed PHD, the ASCOM 5 platform and driver for my scope.

I use a USB 2 Serial adapter to talk to the scope from my macbook (works fine using scopedriver on OSX). I have presented the adapter to the virtual machine but Windows is saying there was a problem with the usb device. PHD Guiding allows me to select my telescope but then tells me it can't communicate with it. Obviously related to the windows problem with the device.

So.. what am I missing? All the hardware is working, but something is problematic with either the OSX, parallels, or windows side of things.

Thanks for any and all suggestions and I'd be most interested to hear form others who do a similar thing.
Cheers,
Ben.