caseydog

Here's the situation: I had no trouble at all in setting up bluetooth ActiveSync between my 2495 and my home PC. Works just great on COM 5.
My office machine is identical (hardware) and also has XP Pro (SP2). The bluetooth dongle on each is a Zoom, again withidentical (as far as I can tell) set-up. The problem is that no matter what I do, the COM port setting for Bluetooth Serial is constrained to COM 16 or COM 17.

When I look at the Hardware Device Manager these ports (16 & 17) are assigned to Bluetooth Serial, and I just can't seem to find a way to switch it down to COM 5 where the PPC is set.

I must be doing something wrong - but what? I've looked all through the Bluetooth settings... I've even uninstalled and re-installed the Bluetooth software.

Any suggestions?
Thanks,
Derek

zavill

Just for my clarification, what ports you see in ActiveSync, at work? (File> connection settings> Allow connection to one of the following).
This is the first step and then we'll see...

caseydog

ActiveSync just shows COM1 & COM2 (hardware ports).
I've been doing some more investigation. It seems that every time I un-install/re-install the Bluetooth software, the assigned COM port for Serial Bluetooth gets raised - with no way of resetting it (that I can find). I am now at COM33. This shows up in the Device Manager, and in the registry under
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\HARDWARE\DEVICEMAP\SERIALCOM
I have tried making the change to COM5 in the registry, but it won't take.
It's as if the system has a "next available" stored somewhere for COM port assignment, and that this is not being reset on an un-install, so the assigned port is incremented each time a new serial port is assigned.

The bluetooth connection is working for non-serial port connection.

zavill

OK, then uninstall the BT software, backup the registry, and delete (manually) all the comm references created by the BT software. Try to find out other places in the registry where that software has a reference and delete it.
Then restart the PC and install again the BT software.

I had a similar problem with IntelliSync (which was everything but intelli ;-) and who incremented in the same way the port for an Infrared connection.
The uninstall should normally (or at least I think it would be normal) do it and/or the newly created port (comm 33 in your case) should be mapped to a hardware one, but apparently is not the case.

caseydog

Fixed it - but what a PITA! I finally did a system restore back to the day before I installed the Zoom Bluetooth software, then re-installed it to give me a Bluetooth Serial Port on COM3. Then added two more BT serial ports to give me COM4 & 5, and then deleted 3&4. After that everything worked fine.

Of course I lost all software that was installed after the restore point.... Talk about stupid software!