I am trying to extend the life of a DOS application that works fine on Windows XP. It was running on an older PC that had a built in parallel port which worked for printing. Now that old PC died and only Windows 64 bit machines are available. I created a Windows XP virtual machine that runs on this machine in VMWare Player 12.5 and the host PC has a parallel port card on LPT3. I configured the VM settings to redirect the parallel port to the file "LPT3" and the DOS application in the VM prints perfectly to the printed attached Host PC... for a while.
They don't use this app often so I just had them suspending the VM and resuming it when this app is needed which worked great several times. Now sometimes it works and sometimes when trying to print VMWare pops up the error message: Parallel:Unable to write to the file "LPT3" over and over and printing no longer works. We somehow got this working again after several reboots of the VM and the host. I don't even know what actually fixed it and it worked for a while again. It's in this state where it doesn't print again today and I really was hoping to find either an easy way to fix this when it happens, or better a way to prevent it from getting in this state.
Any suggestions?
