Thank you all for taking the time to add to this enquiry.
I feel that soon I will be in a Home For Distressed Machinery Retro-fitters. I have considerably less hair than before and I've smoked more fags in the last fortnight than in the last six months.
(just to clarify that last statement; "smoking fags" if you are East of the 45th parallel refers to the consumption of cigarettes and not some sort of mass-murder, or worse.)
I've reinstalled LPT2, with the correct drivers, port address is still 1040, and pins 2-9 as inputs box is checked. I've checked in BIOS and in hardware devices, all appears OK. On the LPT2 Homann MB02-V6 board, the jumper is in the correct position for pins 2-9 to be inputs, but these are not seen by Mach3. I changed over the MB-02 LPT1 to LPT2 and vice-versa, still no inputs seen on pins 2-9. The normal inputs/outputs work on both BOBs and are seen by Mach3, so I see no issues there.
So is the lack of inputs 2-9 due to the LPT2 card or the Homann BOB? Or a combination of the two?
Well, signals on pins 2-9 are going down the LPT2 cable and reaching the computer, I can see these with my multimeter, so the BOB can be ruled out.
I contacted these people here in the UK:
http://www.brainboxesstore.com/product_details_25.htm One of their hardware Engineers got interested in my enquiry and very kindly put one of their cards on an oscilloscope, checked all the I/O's and here's what he said:
"I think it is very likely that the UC-146 will meet his requirements. The chip we use for the UC cards drives pins 2-9 (the data pins) of the LPT port low at reset, and all PCI-compliant motherboards hold the PCI slots in a reset state during power-up. So by design, the UC-card LPT ports operate in the way he requires. I did some oscilloscope measurements with a UC-146 card, and I did find that there was a small glitch on these pins at startup: there was a pulse of up to 0.88V lasting for 360us. This is probably occurring as the power to the card ramps up, and has to reach a certain point before the logic in the chip starts working and drives the signals low. The pulse length may vary depending on the host PC, but I guess it would not get much higher in voltage. When I set the 'scope to trigger at 1.0V, it did not trigger on any of the pins 2-9 at power-up. That covers the behaviour of the hardware, but might the Windows device driver for the LPT port cause the pins to change? I haven't tested this, but I doubt it because we use the standard Microsoft device driver for our LPT ports, and I get the impression that the customer is already using a standard LPT port (which will use the same driver) without problems."
These cards are not cheap at 57GBP + tax+ shipping, but if it preserves what is left of my sanity I'll be more than happy.........watch this space.