I recently installed an input/output pen, better known as a digital pen, on my machine. Almost immediately I ran into a problem: the system couldn't see the pen. 

There was some indication that the pen needed to access the Internet so I investigated that by loading up the A-squared Hijack Free which shows the ports that are open. It turned out that the pen was trying to access the Internet on several ports. I checked my firewall (Zone Alarm Pro) to ensure that the digital pen's software was able to get out on those ports. No go, unfortunately. The ports were all open; but the Digital Pen wasn't recognized. I then contacted Logitech, who supplies the drivers for these.

They gave me the standard advice about updating drivers, etc. No change.

 I then asked them whether Wingate (a peer-to-peer Internet sharing program) might be the culprit. They didn't know. Just for the heck of it, I reset Winsock, using the program WinSock XP v1.02, this effectively eliminates WinGate from influencing things . . . and, lo and behold, the system recognized the pen.

I followed up on this by going to the Logitech forum that supports the pen to see if they had a better solution.

A Logitech representative responded. Here's a summary of what he suggested:

• ". . . the pen does not use "the internet". It also does not require that your PC has internet access. It uses the TCP/IP stack to communicate with the Logitech software. The data goes USB -> USB to TCP/IP sockets -> local TCP/IP loopback address (127.0.0.x)."
   
• "The local loopback address does exist on Windows 2000/XP even if you do not have an network card installed"
   
• "Maybe you can configure Wingate to exclude 127.0.0.1 or 127.0.0.x from what it does?"
   
• "So have a look at the WinGate Server configuration, there should be a possibility to change the configuration to have communication from/to 127.*.*.* forwarded unmodified. If there is not, contact the WinGate vendor, they must have encountered this with other applicatons before and should have a solution."
   
• "There is a bunch of files for which you need to turn off the redirector service [in Wingate]. They are at least:
   
•  Pen.TrayIcon.exe
• LPhal.exe
• Pen.Settings.exe
• MySTrainingSynchHandler.exe
• Pen.LplsHost.exe
• DockingEngine.exe
• Pen.Organizer.exe
• Pen.OpenFile.exe
• Pen.Editor.exe
• Pen.Ink.Download.exe
• Loli.FileSystem.AccessManager.Server.exe
   

which on my system have asked for talking to each other on the local stack."

So much for forum help. I know who the culprit is, but how do I "turn off" the redirector service. At present I don't know how.

So, for me, there's no solution to this problem yet; but the one workaround that does work is to use WinSock XP to reset WinSock, then I can use the digital pen and its software . . . unfortunately I can't access the Internet when I'm doing this. After I'm finished then I turn Wingate back on.

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