Damon,
I don't have the two products you mentioned specifically, but I closed down almost everything on my taskbar and still the COM1 connection caused me problems. The only taskbar icons left at this stage were for LAN status, a mobile phone connection facility that explicitly does not use COM1 or COM2, an Intellipoint mouse, volume control and USB hardware removal control.

However, switching to COM2 made everything work fine.

I guess that one of a long list of Windows services (all with obscure names) may be the culprit, or perhaps my PC has a faulty COM1 port.