Don, thanks. I finally remembered that I bought this usb converter cable for 
the dec talk when I was led to believe the voice would be improved by the 
options that were available if I used the usb cable. didn't turn out to be 
true. when I ran into the problem with the serial cable, I decided, what the 
heck, try the usb cable. maybe the ict90 software wasn't intended to be used 
with an usb cable because the hard drive really went into an extended action 
that went on and on. I don't think now that was what caused this problem 
because, as I mentioned, it was already acting up. I have 4 com ports and I 
have checked and tried each of them with the same result. I'm going to check 
that serial cable for continuity right now. thanks again.

Bob K8MXC