Freeing inaccessible COMM ports?

This must be a low level problem because it seems to affect lot's of serial communicationl programs. But I can't live with it in mine. If some 'other' program (often DOS box run programs) does not do close a comm port correctly, that port now becomes unreachable, apparently until the machine is re-booted. Because my program must be run remotely from another machine, and the resident machine must also run third party Comm applications that don't always behave correctly, rebooting is not an option. I wonder if anyone knows of a low level trick that can be used to free a Comm port resource away from a wayward application, so I can open it again with ReadFile().


--Randy C
* * * Second star to the Right!