Quoting VaX#n8,

> I have a pretty strange problem where the com ports appear to 
> be in the wrong state after reboot.  I notice this because the mouse
> probe done from MS-DOS fails and then probes my modem...
> A hard reboot fixes it.

That one has been around for a while; I see it on my system too with
a mouse driver. I never bothered to look if the mouse driver wasn't doing
a very good job, or if something else was going wrong.

- Frank