Hi
Here is the solution to my parallel port problem. I hope this might help someone else. As a last resort
I contacted Art.
Here is his answer: Some motherboards have IO ports on them, but the pins aren’t hooked up to anything
Your numbers seem to indicate that you have a PCI printer port card as well. Do you have 2 printer port
plugs on that machine? NO If not, then Id set Mach3 to use 0x8800 as the address for the first printer port.
 
Ignore serial ports, Mach doesn’t use them anyway. I suspect what’s happening is everything is fine, but your speaking to
a printer port that doesn’t have a plug or is unused. I suspect the PCI printer port is what you want. So try entering
8800 as the printer port address in MAch3 under config ports/pins .. then restart and see if you have to reset the change you made to
the estop pin to get it to reset.

What all this means is I had two ports listed in Device Manager. Here is my list of ports. As I have in the past I kept using
0378. I assumed the machine was not working because the parallel port card that I installed was not configured correctly.
By using Port LPT3 with the address 8800 this port resolved my problems. If you have this motherboard you may experience
the same problems. Asus M2NBP-VM CSM. This board was new in 2006. Its believed by Art that this older machine had a partially
configured parallel port. This was the cause of my trouble.
Here is the machine in question : http://www.woodsolutions.com/diy-cnc.htm

Communication Ports
I/O 0378-037F   this is the one I entered in Mach3... but did not work

PCI Parallel Port LPT 3
8800-8807  This address resolved the probelm
8400-8407
8000-801F

Regards Barry