>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.

I have this problem too -- if I warm boot into MS-DOS from NetBSD,
my (generic mousesystems) mouse driver hangs polling the mouse, and
I have to cold boot. It's a big pain; Perry said the answer would be
to register shutdown hooks to fix the ports' state, but I never looked
into it.

nd