Hi folks,

This problem has cropped up from time to time over the last half year
or so. By coincidence, I found a solution a few days ago.

It mostly affected Win2000 systems, and more recently, XP
systems. As best I could tell, Guide would send data, but couldn't get
any data back from the scope. So (for LX-200 control) "Slew Scope" would
send data to the scope and the scope would move, but Guide never got an
acknowledgment message from the scope. "Slew Guide" wouldn't work at
all, since it requires getting the RA/dec from the telescope.

This had me baffled until I got a message from Eric Vesting, who
distributes Guide in Germany. A friend of his provided a little code
snippet; comparison to my code revealed a segment labelled "this is
different in NT/2000/XP from the 95/98/ME version." I changed about five
lines of my code to match the example, verified that it worked on my WinME
box, and sent it off to a gent who verified that it fixed the problems
he'd run into in Win2000.

I have two changes to make to Guide before posting it: I want to
address the "small moon" problem Lawrence Harris mentioned on this list a
while back, and I need to rearrange USNO Ax.0 handling so that it's not
totally insane. (I started revising/updating the documentation for
it, and realized that it will take less effort to make it work correctly
than it would to document the way it works now... especially now that one
can get Ax.0 from CD-ROMs or from the Internet.) That should be done
sometime tomorrow (Tuesday), and I'll post updated software then.

-- Bill