Hi Neil,

I've read your post about five times, but I'm still not quite sure what your exact requirements are. That may well be my fault, but could you please try to explain a bit more?

The beauty of the FTDI chips is that they can mix both VCP and 'native' (D2XX) communications. Using D2XX, you remove the need to know which COM port the device is using, as you can find the device by its description. This does, of course, require you to program the Description field at manufacturing.
Once you have found the device, you can either communicate with it directly, using D2XX, or you can use the serial number to determine the COM port it uses and then communicate through the VCP.

This leaves the problem of COM ports being opened for each and every device, but that could be resolved by the method described in the app-note mentioned in my other post. You could easily write a small utility that inserts the required key into the registry and make this utility part of the installation.


Rob.