Serial port and Mint Mate system monitor

[Circlotron]

Hi all.
I am using Wine 1.7.19 and Mint Mate, and have a chip programmer connected to the serial port and by and large it works. Sometimes though it stops partway and gives a "communications error" message. If I bring up the system monitor to watch the CPU utilisation it fails partway 100% of the time. This is on two computers, an old 1.6GHz dual core and an i5. I haven't put a scope on the clock and data lines yet but that may be my next move. Any ideas?

[Circlotron]

Further info:
Mint Mate 17, 32 bit.

Terminal output:

fixme:ntoskrnl:HalGetBusData (4 0 71 0x53e4ec 4) stub!
fixme:comm:set_queue_size insize 4096 outsize 4096 unimplemented stub
fixme:ole:RemUnknown_QueryInterface No interface for iid {00000019-0000-0000-c000-000000000046}
err:comm:stop_waiting failed to clear waiting state: 0xc0000008

[dimesio]

File a bug.