i have a problem on debugging my 8052 board. the problem is i get some strange characters continuously when i connect it to com1 and power on the board (i don't have to press the spacebar to get the strange signs.) i want to check out if my serial comunication is working so i wanted to ask you if i unwire the cables from pin10 and 11 of the 8052 which goes stright to the max232 and shorten them together i will have in theory an loopback. everything i send in over the hyperterminal should get transformed by the max232, send out and recived on the other pin, transformed back and send to com1. is this right? when i try this i can type in some characters at the hyperterminal but something like out of 10 characters one ore two are return badly or not returned anyway. this are not special characters, this are the simple a-z and A-Z characters. any ideas. i tryed different baud rates (even the slowest at 110) , no parity and one and even 2 stopbits. no hardware handshaking. any ideas?

thanks a lot
richard