A very quick note before I go to bed for the night... have had a hectic few days ...
While I hope to follow this up more, it seems I have a (perhaps temporary?) fix!
While shuffling pieces of hardware between old dis-used Pentium 4 machines in an attempte to get my old PC running (which I knew the LPT functioned on) I stumbled upon an un-branded LPT card from a early 2000's PC.
The short of the long is that putting that old LPT card in the new PC has resulted in a functioning LPT 1! Mostly through several strokes of luck.
It's a Sunix card, but I don't know exactly the model. THe number vaguely visible on the card its self didn't exactly match the models on their website, so I picked one of the 6 that were somewhat like it. Installing those drvers, it appars to have "just worked"!!
Interestingly, the resources assined to the PCI Controller device listing for it in Device Manager are high, like the new cards, not normal LPT ranges. Interestingly also, the Port entry its self in the Device Manager does not list any resource (the others have).
Anyway...
Have run out of time to investigate more tonight. I am going to persue the other LPT card more, as it has 2 COM ports on it that I could do with.
More to come on the weekend when I investigate it further hopefully..
Thank you very much everyone for your assistance..
Roger.