Wasn't sure exactly where to post this, as it involves a little bit of everything.

I'm working as an in-house tech for a roof & floor truss plant. The GM has a PC with an ECS Mobo (can't get the exact model # at the moment, but it's a VIA KT133A chipset). Everything was hunky dory with it until a week or so ago, when we hooked up a new HP LaserJet 4050 to the LPT port. MOST things would print out fine, but on a fairly frequent basis, he'd get garbled characters/missing images on engineering drawings (think Autocad). At first, I figured it to a bug in the software, but it prints fine through the network to an LJ4000, and upon closer inspection, they are both using the same driver (HP LJ4), as this software tends to work better with older, legacy HP drivers.

After testing an LJ2100 on the local port, I figured it to a faulty LPT port. Rather than have to wait on a replacement motherboard, the GM decided instead to get PCI parallel port & use that instead. We picked up a NetMos 9805 PCI parallel port, installed it, hooked the printer up to it, and everything seemed great. All the images and such came out fine. But then, later, when he tried to save to the floppy drive, the system hung. I don't mean "lock up, won't respond to CTRL+ALT+DEL" hang...I mean, sit there accessing the floppy drive and not do anything else while attempting to read it, only to give up after 30 seconds hang. Amazing, you disabled the 2nd parallel port in device managed & reboot, and the floppy works again.

I see NO resource conflicts of any type, and this is a pretty base install, and there are quite a few of these motherboards at the place, which all run with no problems. I said to hell with it after tring for a half an hour, then deleted the enum key in the registry & let it re-detect all the hardware. Found everything fine, and believe it or not - the second parallel port & the floppy now co-exist. The problem? My garbled characters in the engineering program is back. And this is WITH the new parallel port, and the on-board one disabled in the bios.

I've never seen anything quite like this, but then again, I live a pretty sheltered life. If anyone can shed some light on this one, I'd be eternally grateful.