John Foust wrote:
 I recently tried a Belkin USB-to-serial and a second brand (Amb-something)
 on my Win2000 box in hopes of delivering an extra serial port for
 my old Palm III.  No go!  Both blue-screened when Palm Desktop
 tried to access the serial port.  I suspect that either my motherboard
 USB is blown or the drivers didn't like a dual-processor machine. 
   Try Keyspan.  Depending on what you need, they go reasonably cheaply
on eBay.  I've used one to provide VTserver, and have quite a few
friends who use theirs for console access to Sparcs, RS/6000, and Alphas
 from portless laptops. 
  There are PCMCIA to serial adapters, no?  And
we'll be able to
 insert PCI serial cards as long as PCI is around.   
   Be very careful - look up some user experiences - with the PCI serial
adapters.  Some of them are very Windows-only.
        Doc