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Okay, let me clarify the design of our dashboard program a little bit.
The key element that we want to have is style and visual apeal. Now, since refresh rate isn't that important, we decided to make the display in Flash.
The problem is that Flash only does scripting - not any real programming. It's designed for the web, not real programming. As I see it, the only way to get Flash to read the info from the Dashboard is to use the import data options in Flash.
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Yeah I understand your need for a nice looking GUI for this and that's exactly why I suggested Sash. What I understand of it is that it allows you to simply and easily code up fancy GUI programs but also allows you to retain access to serial ports, hardware, etc which Flash does not. Like I said, you wouldn't want to restart your program with this instead by any means, but for future projects it might offer a little more flexibility.
I'm not trying to imply that your design isn't good or won't work. It's actually a pretty common way to pass data around. I was just trying to help think of ways that you can improve the throughput without sacrificing the visual effectiveness of the project. It sounds like you've done the appropriate testing and are confident that this solution will work, so best of luck and keep us posted!
Also, I wrote a program that spits out fake Dashboard port data for use in testing our Palm app for StangSense. Ian mentioned that you are losing access to your robot after this weekend, so maybe this could help. I could probably revive that and you could then hook two PCs together and have one pretend to be the operator interface if that would help... You also might be able to hook a PC up to the Operator Interface and just capture the Dashboard data to a file using Hyperterminal which you could then play back to the other PC. We never got that to work for us (hence the program to generate Dashboard data) but maybe you'd have better luck.