[WriteLog] USB to serial on XP report and help request!

[Dave LaBat]

Machine: Toshiba Laptop running Celeron at 1.5G (?), 256 Mb memory, Windows
XP home. Latest WL installed.
After the counsel from this wise group I acquired 2 Belkin USB to serial
converters to run on my laptop for the 160 test last weekend. All seemed
good in intial tests. Found out about the ports "going to sleep" issue whe I
left the machine up and running for a few hours without use. Rebooting
solved that. Never had an issue while I used the machine .
Problems: I occassionaly had the keyer port malfunction. I would be in an
exchange, hit my callsign, get acknowledge, hit the exchange msg and the
keying would "squirt". It sounded like the keying would go from 25 WPM to 60
or 70 WPM. It must have been real fast because nobody copied it! Lucky I had
the paddle there with the keyer! Writelog would go into a nonresponsive
mode, had to be shut down and rebooted. Once it dumped the OS and had to
resart the computer. Had an error msg from XP twice: server not ready,
forced a retry and WL non-responsive. It only happened when I using the
messages, otherwise, no problem.

My setup has the first USB to serial showing up as COM 4, the rig is
connected here. The second USB to serial shows as COM 5 which in the
Writelog.ini I have shown as CommSlot1=5. This got WL to show COM 5 in the
ports setup menu which I have the CW keying on.

This seems related to the USB serial converters. Is there some way to shut
XP down to minimal programs? I didn't do that this weekend. I am much more
concerned if this setup is going to function for the 10 meter this weekend
with soundboard DVK. The setup works on the workbench without the rig, I
will try this week to see what will happend. Going to try to run the
Rigblaster on Com 5, but will also try switching Com ports.

My question: what in XP produced the increase in codespeed? Any ideas if
this will effect voice keying?
Thanks guys. 73, Dave K0XH