I have been down this road although it has been a few years because I stear clear of these issues. I'll give you a little of what I have done from memory.
First, the serial cable that comes with a ML1000 does work when it is connected to a PC with Linx and the "PIC" driver, but they strongly advise not to do this because of possible damage.
Next, there was an interface that became available when these were new, called an AIC+ and it does work, but it still required a "PIC" driver. The problem with the PIC is that windows does not respect the original PC Serial port design and the PIC came before Windows, so the bottom line is that the PIC has to own the serial port and windows does not like that. In order to get the PIC to work, the PC has to be rebooted so that the PIC can steal the port before Windows tries to take it over.
If you do this, do not expect anything else serial to work on the PC until you de-install the PIC in Linx and reboot. At that point, the PC should return to normal.
Since all that "stuff", another interface became available called the UIC which uses a USB port and it has it's own Windows friendly driver in Linx. The UIC has an RS232 port and RS422 port.
I have both of these things and I got to playing around with them in several configurations and I discovered that there is more than one way to set them up. In one application, I needed the AIC+ to get to a PanelView so to program, I connected it's serial port to the serial port on the UIC and it worked perfect while the other was working to the ML1000. The RS422 port on the UIC can work to the port on the ML1000 also which is great because it avoids the PIC driver.
One last, but very important point to remember when you forget all the rest that I have told you. When you use that serial port setup screen shown in your screen dump, It may not actually place those parameters into the serial port configuration. So that means that you can be flying blind and not know it.
The solution to this problem is to go to the "Device Manager" and find the port configuration popup and do the config manually there.
I wish you success. Once you get past this "stuff", the rest is pretty easy. And the ML1000 is a great box. If you go to americansensors.com and look at the systems, I wrote all of the first generation applications of those systems into a single ML1000 Analog application.
It was full, but they all worked perfectly with a few software switches to alter the configuration of the measuring systems.
Best Regards,
Bob A.
