My Picstart Plus programmer running under MPLAB is really starting to
make me doubt my knowledge of computers.  I seem to spend more time
getting the programmer to run than actually doing development work on
it.  Its latest phenomena is to refuse to work on COM1 or COM2, but
only on COM4.  The only problem is that I have only COM1 and COM2 on my
computer.  Every time I try to set the thing up for one of these two
comm ports it gives me a message "Could not open comm port" and then
"Picstart Plus not found on COM4".   I suspect that it must be
something to do with my Win95 configuration, but 4 hours of fiddling
which included re-installing MPLAB and Win95 could not solve the
problem.  I knew my comm ports were still working because I had no
problems getting my mouse and modem to work on them.  It was just my
Picstart Plus programmer that refused to work on them.  Out of
desperation I eventually configured my COM2 as COM4 and "voila!",
MPLAB was happy with that.   But why would it not work on COM2 is
boyond my comprehension.  Has anybody else ever had a similiar
problem or is it just me?   The Microchip documentation does not mention this
problem at all.

When I was originally selected a programmer, I decided upon
the Picstart Plus because I thought that the fact that it was a
Microchip product would mean that all the usual bugs associated with
cheap programmers would be eliminated.  Now I'm not so sure anymore
whether that is really the case.  If I would buy another programmer
again I would much rather buy one from one of third party suppliers
present on this list.

Rgds
Werner