IFI Loader usually hangs midway thru load

[gnormhurst]

I am struggling with IFI loader intermittently hanging. The progress bar makes it part way across and then it hangs. Even with the default code from the web site! Sometimes it makes it all the way, the terminal window pops up and the code runs. But it takes about 3-5 tries to get a successful load. This is slowing down development. By the time it actually loads and runs, I have sometimes forgotten the change I was trying! But that's mostly due to middle age...

By "hanging" I mean that the progress bar stops moving, I click on the "X" to kill the program and I get a dialog box that tells me that the program is not responding, which lets me kill it. I then re-launch IFI Loader and try again. After 3-5 cycles of this, it usually succeeds.

I started with version 1.0.6 on Windows 2000 Pro SP2 on a Dell Latitude CPi 366 MHz 128 MB with a "real" serial port. I upgraded W2K to SP3 (because Dashboard would not install otherwise), then reinstalled IFI Loader to see if that would help -- no change. I called David Maxwell at IFI, a nice guy who tried to be helpful but could not think of much more than "try the new version" (1.0.7), which I did, but no change, it still hangs 4 out of 5 tries.

I'm out of ideas. What can I try? Could another app be touching the COM port in the background? How would I know? Are there COM port settings I can change? Buffer settings? Can I slow down the serial port on the RC to 56K? A reliable loader at half the speed would be a big improvement!

-Norm