I posted this in another thread, but am posting it here to make it easier to find in case anyone else is having the same problem.
I am running VWS on a small, slow Windows 10 netbook connected to an original Vantage Pro with serial Weatherlink. Four months back my serial to USB adapter stopped working and I got a new one with the reputable FTDI chipset. It worked fine for three months.
Then every few days Windows started getting the "instruction referenced memory" crashes
referenced in this thread, and also "could not communicate with port" errors. It would work for an hour or a day, and then get one error or the other.
Another device is connected to the netbook to monitor a solar panel installation. It connects through another USB port, but in the Device Manager it appears as a second serial port and uses the same FTDI driver. Probably internally it is a serial device with an on-board FTDI chip providing the USB interface.
Looking at the driver settings in Device Manager, I noticed that both ports were set to 9600 baud. I knew the Vantage Pro was operating at 19,200.
So on the Vantage Pro I set it to operate at 9600 baud. A week later I have not seen any more errors.
My best guess is that after operating for a bit, the drivers got the settings confused between the ports and set one port to the baud rate of the other, which somehow caused the errors. Maybe it was triggered by the driver processing input from one port and being interrupted by data from the other port.
I have no idea why the error started happening when it did (Jan. 2017). The driver files are dated 10/16 and 7/16 so it wasn't from a driver update.
But everything seems to be working again. "Eppur si muove."
