Robert,

I have been stuck like this before and had some success with AMI bios at
least in choosing the legacy option in the bios setup for irq's 3 and 4
This effectively disables (I believe..others correct me if I am
wrong)plug and play for these IRQ's and allows you to force a device into
an assigned IRQ...if your bios allows this choice you might want to try
this...

I have also disabled all the com ports on occassion and pulled out
anything that uses one except the modem....just recently I had to do this
with a KDS (Amquest)56K and I finally got it installed on com #1..I'm not
too happy about this but the machine uses a mouse port so I still have a
comm port free.

Hope this helps a little,

Bob Chapel

 I have gone through the BIOS and disabled COM2 ( there are no other
> ports/IRQs available on this machine ) and set the modem to use COM2.
> If I disable COM2 and leave the modem out of the system, w95 still
> detects a COM Port, but it can not set it up ( has yellow exclamation
> ).  No matter what I do, I can not remove it because it always detects
> it again.  If I put the modem in on COM2, then do an 'Add new hardware'
> it will find the modem on COM2, but it will also detect this other COM
> Port mysteriously ( it always shows the yellow exclamation ).  It
> detects COM1 without a problem.