My Nokia DKU-5 cable has started playing up: The Nokia PC Suite can no longer find my phone.

So, I've uninstalled everything, and I'm planning on reinstalling it all.

Unfortunately, the two previous installations have decided to occupy COM3 and COM4, even though they're not present any more.

I've found the box in Device Manager that allows you to reassign the COM ports, but (as you can see) it says that COM3 and COM4 are in use. Where's this stored? Can I tell Windows that these ports aren't used any more?

For me in W2K, in the device manager window select view->show hidden devices. When those two com ports show up, highligh them then hit the delete key, and that should remove them.

select view->show hidden devices. When those two com ports show up

Tried that. They didn't show up. Couldn't delete them.

In the end, I just reassigned the device to COM3, and then removed it. This appears to have marked COM3 as unused, so the next time I installed it, it took COM3 without complaining.

I'll have to do something equally cunning to mark COM4 as unused if I need to use it in future.