First, congrats John, K8YSE on a remarkable accomplishment. Well done. I always enjoy connecting with you via space.
I just finished a close to 2 week frustrating ordeal after my serial/usb adapter suddenly failed and SATPC stopped doing its magic. Im running a TS2K, SATPC and W7 pro on a Dell XPS with an I5 processor. Device manager showed a faulty Prolific driver. Many driver downloads later of the Prolific chip driver and the same for the driver in another Chinese chipped adapter, still no joy. I even ran other versions of SATPC. There has been much discussion in this forum about which are the best serial/usb adapters/chipsets. Some do well with prolific, others not so much. However, no one seems to have difficulty with the FTDI chipset. So I found a highly rated adapter with the FTDI chip on Amazon, loaded the drivers from the included disc, and.... no joy. I was ready to begin testing the serial port on my TS2K when I ran across a post on the TS2K yahoo group forum recommending use of the FTDI chip, but, most importantly, the writer recommended dumping the disc and downloading the most recent driver from www.ftdichip.comhttp://www.ftdichip.com. There it was. After re-booting everything, CAT kicked in and I was back in business.
I write this because I spent a ridiculous amount of time trying different adapters, downloading drivers, rebooting in different order, and so forth until getting the right combination of FTDI chip and current driver for W7 pro.
This issue has been discussed a lot here and on the TS2K yahoo group, but it bears repeating. If you are having similar issues, perhaps you can benefit from my time spent chasing this down.
73s and happy holidays to my many sat friends!
Craig N6RSX
Ps- I had the pleasure of being one of the contacts with NA1SS (Col. Doug Wheelock) in that NASA vid posted by KA2UPW/5