Sounds like a software problem. Your chances of both serial ports going bad are
pretty slim. Also, it works part of the time, right? You could try disabling thaoe ports in
the BIOS, and getting a serial port card.

Did you know you can rerun setup to reinstall windows, without formatting or
trashing your existing stuff? My daughter's PC had trouble with a network
card not working, and IDE driver failing to use protected mode (slow). I ran the
setup for windows. It ran through like a new install, but all existing software
was left untouched.

You would just put in the install CD and run SETUP.EXE