IRMAN won't initialise - tried suggestions in FAQ

[itm]

I've got Girder 3.29b installed on a fresh install of Windows 2000 Advanced Server. I have an IRMan connected to COM2. When I load the IRMAN plugin I get the familar message "plugin is loaded in memory but hardware initialisation failed". At this point I had not installed any of the Evation software. I tried un-installing and re-installing Girder a couple of times, and also tried version 3.2.8. I remember getting this problem before, on the same hardware, but when it was running Windows 2000 Pro instead of Server. At that time the problem went away without explanation when I uninstalled/re-installed a couple of times - not this time.
I finally loaded the Evation IR Server, just to see if the hardware worked OK - everything was fine, so I un-installed it, and also the version (2) of Girder which was installed with it.
There are no other plug-ins or other programs that I know of which can be using COM2 - can anyone suggest anything else to try?
TIA
Ian

[miked]

Obviously I assumed you did the usual checks, making sure that the correct serial port is selected, etc.

Two things come to mind:

1) I couldn't get Girder to recognize the IRMan until I actually installed the Evation.com software for the IRMan. I don't run the s/w ever, but if it's not installed, the IRMan doesn't work. Not sure if it's loading some sort of driver file (which seems unintuitive to me), or what the deal is).

2) Make sure that the serial port is set to the highest possible baud rate -- 115200 (I noticed that my new HTPC allows me to set 128000, but I don't do this, as I've never heard of a serial port going above 115K before), or at least 57.6K.