[RWebb]

nope, no change after installing the catalyst suite - I'd expect the Win 7 Device Mgr. to have downloaded the best / latest driver anyway.

re: Mac - I have one piece of critical software that has always required a PC with a serial port on it -- I am going to check and see if they have a Mac version of it

other issues are that my Dell XP system always worked pretty well - all this started with this new computer, its hardware, and Win 7 (and with MS Orifice 2003)

Apple makes you do things their way - until now Windows let me (with a bit more effort) do things my way, but Win 7 has forced me to do a lot of things in different ways (or not at all) and has been a tremendous hassle