I still long for the day when someone makes a true 16550 based USB to serial adapter... Some of the stuff I need to reprogram at the shop at times does not like the cheapie chips that are most common - I've bricked an APC network manager card at least once for that specific reason...
says more about the apc network manager card... if it can't handle rs232 properly... well...(or, from what i understand from this, doesn't have checksums on its firmware files or doesn't check them ;)