Have you tried "Help" in VB6 and searched for mscomm? There is nothing fancy about it, you pretty much have to do everything. Its only Event is "OnComm", and all that it really does for you is sends and recieves raw data through a comm port. Breaking the data into packets, verifying that it was recieved//sent and reassembling it are all up to your application. It does handle some of the more mundane things like allowing you to set baud rates and other protocols, but unless you are trying to interface with a piece of hardware that you have access to all of the protocols for, and know what they mean, it is pretty much useless. The other problem with it is that its thread priority is set by windows, and if windows is busy, your hardware needs to be patient, something most hardware is not very good at. It can be very tricky to try to link to existing DOS hardware with this control because of this timing issue. You can use the timer control to try to force this latency problem away, but this only helps if the application with the oncomm control has focus, otherwise, even the ontimer event can become sluggish....
LOL
Hunter