I have been trying to write a program to capture data from a ROLM ACD
Telephone Call Center.  The Call Center spits a report out to a line printer
through a COM port.

I would like to unplug the line printer and hook it up to a PC so I have a
digital copy of the report.

I have written a program that I thought would work. I hooked two PC's
together via COM ports and my program worked great at capturing the data the
second PC sent. However, when I unplugged the line printer hooked up the PC,
I get nothing.

Anyone have any advise?

I am using the COM control that comes with VB5.

Sounds like a hardware problem. (I assume you set up properly baud rate,
data bits, stop bits etc...)
Try to hard wire the handshake signals... Has always been a pain in
the... neck !

I did an almost identical job a few years back in QuickBasic, parsing the
output from a Panasonic Box in just the way you describe.  I too used to PC
to simulate while testing, but it failed when I linked to the Panasonic.
The problem for me was

wait for it

The cable used to connect the Panasonic (supplied by the manufacturer) to
the printer had the bear minimum of wires necessary (about 4 or 5 if I
remeber correctly) to send data to the printer.  To get it working via a PC
you need a full compliment.  Get hold of a proper parallel port cable and
with the luck of the gods, you should be OK ;-)

Thanks for the input guys. Supposedly, someone who quit about a year ago had
been working on it and did get data. However, a new IT guy came into the
phone room and wiped the OS from the PC. I really doubt the other other guy
ever had it working since I'm sure he would showed reports to someone.
Perhaps he was using another cable or some other hardware??

You need a NULL modem adapter to cross the signlal lines in the cable.
Printers are wired differently than computers.

If you are interested, the company that I work for sells a serial
communications program called the Software Wedge that is designed to
do a similar job to what you are doing. The Software Wedge is an
executable program that can pass serial data back and forth to other
programs using either DDE (Dynamic Data Exchange) or by converting
incoming serial data to keystrokes (i.e. it stuffs the keyboard buffer
with the incoming serial data). It can also simply log data to a disk
file like you are doing.
The program is extremely easy to use and is designed to have you up
and running sending and receiving serial data directly from within
your application in just a few minutes.
Please visit http://www.taltech.com for more information.