Windows – Vista Serial programmatically

You can install VirtualPC (or other virtualization software) and install Vista as virtual system, so you don't need two computers. For this part of the debugging, it probably better that you explicitly do not install visual studio to make sure there's not some hidden dependency in your program that visual studio provides. At this point you want to be testing the fully-deployed version of the app.

The biggest rule I've found so far for developing for vista is making sure that you never write anything to the same folder where the program is installed. Write to the Application Data folder instead. This was a rule for XP, too, but it's much more strictly enforced in vista.

To the best of my knowledge you can't close a serial port that you do not have the handle to. My experience of Bluetooth serial ports is that they can end up getting mapped to different COM port numbers at connection time, and can sometimes leave bogus COM ports when disconnected. For example, I currently have no bluetooth devices connected, but if I go into device manager, I see a total of eleven COM ports listed as Bluetooth serial port The properties on each of these ports show the device as working and available, and I can usually open these ports though I get occasional failures. My work around for this is to force COM port numbers for connected deviced, through properties / advanced / COM port number. I'm not sure if the problem is driver related (IVT corp in this case) or a problem with the way Windows manages blutooth serial ports.

Sorry I couldn't be of any more help.