Closing other process's serial connection

[Eugen]

Hi there,

I am trying to find out how to close a connection on a serial port that was left open by an application that terminated and did not close the connection nicely. The only way i know now is by restarting the computer, which is annoying and time consuming.
After reading the documentation i am rather sceptical that can be done other than with a driver, which is too much trouble really .

To explain more, its a colleague of mine that has these problems, with 2 applications he uses for serial communication, one its Hyperterminal and another one i cant remember the name now. Apparently with each one the problem occurs from time to time, when he closes the application forgetting to close the connection first. This is not happening very often, but when it happens he's forced to restart the comp which is not nice, he has all kinds of apps started..

Btw, the comp is running XP.

Any ideas are welcomed.

Eugen

[sinsi]

Try deleting the port(s) from Device Manager, then scanning for hardware changes.
Dunno, might work - at least it's better than a reboot...

[Eugen]

Thanks for the suggestion, sinsi. Its funny, but somebody already suggested this to me so it realy must be tried now  :lol. Suggestion has been transmited to the man in trouble, but now the described problem refuses to appear, in order to test the idea. Clasical 'murphy' style behavior  :wink - the problem arises ONLY when it will make most damage possible  :bdg.

Eugen