[MrForbes]

One of my younger sons is playing with VEX stuff, trying to learn programming...we borrowed the robotics team laptop, which had been used to load programs onto the FRC robot, using a Targus USB-serial adapter. The VEX programming kit CD is somewhere else, whereabouts unknown, but the intelitek software had been installed and unlocked on the laptop. The loader would not work with the orange VEX adapter, although allegedly it had been working before.

After much goofing off and searching for info I finally discovered that the orange adapter might contain a Prolific chip, so I deleted the Targus driver and downloaded and installed a Prolific driver...it started working right away.

So...if you need to get an orange VEX USB-serial adapter working, try finding a Prolific driver.

this info would have saved me a few hours if I could have found it earlier, hopefully I'll save someone else some time.