I have a old 486 DX33 AST Advantage Pro that has been upgraded to a 486DX 4
100 with 16 megs of FPM SIMMs,,,, IDE drive.  I am using it as a Win95b
Proxy Server for a cable modem and a Printer server. Nothing else. The
Advantage Pro  was very proprietary and came with on board serial, parallel
, PS2 ports as well as a on board IDE controller ...unique for it's
time..... and on board video.

It has four ISA slots all of them filled.
GSI 18 controller to handle LBA
Two Kingston KNE20L NICS for the LAN and the Modem
High speed Parallel 16 Bit Parallel Port Card..this is a one year old card
that is in addition to the on board parallel port. I am using it as LPT 2
IRQ 5 I/O 278

I have a laser printer on port LPT 1 that works good. My problem began when
I tried to install a HP 820 CSE  on LPT 2.  The printer installed OK and
recognized the port correctly but with later test the driver did not
recognize the port correctly as bidirectional and while I can test print
locally single direction I can't print across the network. I don't get a
error message....I can see the CPU come to life when I print for a client
but nothing happens. Eventually I tried removing it from LPT2 and
reinstalling on LPT1. Driver install informed me it couldn't find LPT 1 and
asked me if I wanted to select the port ...1 ...2... or 3. Apparently there
is a third port address.
Diagnostics show

Port 1 on  I/O 378...IRQ 7
Port 2 on I/O 278...IRQ 5
Port 0 on I/O 3BC no IRQ assigned

Ports work but LPT doesn't pass bidirectional test and I am wondering if it
has something to do with port 0 in there.

I am hardly using any IRQs ..COM ports are disabled and the BIOS settings
for Parallel Ports is LPT 1 =378h IRQ 7 and LPT2 =  278h IRQ 5. I know the
printer and  cable work OK...I have been using them on another PC and have
previously used it on this PC ..minus the add in card Parallel port. I have
used the Port card on another PC and it works OK.  The Laser printer works
fine on either port.
I have also tried moving the ISA card to other slots but it didn't help.

I thinking that it is probably some kind of BIOS glitch. I have few
adjustments available to me in the BIOS and since I have already turned off
all devices available I am begining to think this is not resolvable.

Any ideas ?

thanks
m

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