title: How to get stable COM-ports for USB serial dongles in Windows XP?
body: <p>I develop embedded systems and need serial ports for communication.</p>
  
  <p>In Windows XP the numbers for USB serial port dongles keep moving around, which makes it hard to use in scripts or makefiles (for example for flash programming NXP controllers via their built-in bootloader, or for controlling a target and two lab devices at the same time).</p>
  
  <p>Is there a way to fix the COM-port for such a dongle? In Linux I can do this via udev by matching against the serial number of FTDI dongles (see <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/a/13741634/49246">this answer I just gave</a> while searching for an answer to this question).</p>