Stoobie, Your lead FIXED the problem!!

When Stoobie mentioned Administration I started exploring Windows under XP and Vista and they are both similar in this regard. You need to go to Administrative Tools, then to Services, then to COM + Event System AND COM + System Application. Both are defaulted (at least on my systems) to Manual, they BOTH need to be switched to Automatic and that allows your COM ports to function properly to detect the remote.

Thanks everyone for all their help....

Dave