I've solved the problem- Thanks for steering me in the right direction. The problem is that your traditional "COM1" does not exist on this computer (Thanks Grant). A trip to the Device manager listed all the COM ports on the computer. After successfully connecting to COM7 (port = serial.Serial(6)), I realized the reason I couldn't connect to COM40 was because it was tied up with hyper terminal. after closing everything, I was able to issue a readline and collect data. Thanks for the help!
jimmy -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
