We have a piece of hardware that continuously outputs a 5 letter string
(e.g. "ABCDEABCDEABCDE...") at 9600 8N1 asynchronous, with no flow control
at all, just a Tx and GND pin. When I connect the board up to a serial port
on NetBSD/i386 and run "minicom", it prints out "ABCDEABCDEABCDE..." as one
would expect. However, if I unplug the connector and then plug it back in
again, sometimes the information becomes corrupt: sometimes it transmits
"&&&&&&&&&&&&&", sometimes ".~.~.~.~" and sometimes it prints a few "e e ee
eee e e" and then just stops receiving totally.

I have tried the test with the board connected at the same time to
NetBSD/i386 running "minicom" and "that other O/S" ;) running
"HyperTerminal" - when I pull out the serial cable and replace it,
HyperTerminal continues receiving the correct info all the time, while
minicom get corrupt or stops receiving at all.

Has anybody else seen similar problems? It seems to manifest when you do a
serial port open(), or read() when data is already coming through, or
something like that....

Thanks
 Bruce Martin