I have used my own comms software, hyperterminal etc plus vb (gives me bit stream access) and nothing works.
I have this nagging feeling that this is the comms port to be honest or rarther the wrong caps on teh max232cpe level converter I have built several of these and have used 20uf instead these are proper maxim devices as well
but I have this feeling that it may be possible that the caps are wrong as the ICD does not connect either mmmmmm off to replace the caps I think.

But I have also tried without the interface as well and get exactly the same datastream ... The operating system is irrelevent but I have used W2k and OS X I have windows 98 so I may give this a try, I also need to check the fifo buffers for the W2K box and see if these are not messing me up...

The vaio machine I am using does not want to talk to some devices sometimes and maybe this is the root, of course it could be guess work as the Mac is rock solid.

Mark