Parallel Port, XP and suspicious activities?

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I think though the key to avoiding unwanted activity, might be to go into device manager, and disable the port. This will still leave any BIOS scanning present, but will stop XP, from tying to find if a 'P&P' printer is present, which will normally involve it putting some patterns on the lines.

Best Wishes

Exactly. I think you are right. XP is looking for a "plug and play" printer.

Alternatively, what if you tell XP that a "generic-text only" printer is installed on the port?

I think the problem is the Asus A8N board which seems to have a defect in its parallel port.

look here:

I tried to install a printer on the parallel port of the A8N SLI board. And it didn't work.

I tried all different drivers all specified fo win xp. I tried all BIOS settings of the parallel port.

The printer port is "virtualized" in XP.

That means when you THINK you're executing an out 378h,al, the CPu traps that as an illegal instruction and some low-level driver tries to do roughly what it looks like you're trying to do to the port. This emulation is a bit less than exact, especially for the loosely defined handshaking bits. And the timing is going to be about 12000% off.

If you want precise control of the parallel port, do it under real MSDOS (not the DOS window in XP). Real MSDOS, booted directly from a floppy or hard disk, no first jump into windows.

Well, actually you can go into Windows first, if it's windows 95/98, the you do a "resart in DOS mode".