Dongle Excitement

This little issue began on Friday last week when I realised that the Tyan Thunder motherboard (S2895 K8WE) had no parallel port. Without a parallel port, parallel port dongles for various software applications can't be attached to allow the software to initialise. This is Monday and despite continuing to try and get a PCI-parallel card to 'see' a Microimages MIPS dongle on this M/B, I've had no success. Not even after re-installing the card in three different PCI slots, re-installing the drivers, changing PCI slot settings in the BIOS,re-assigning LPT's 1 through 3. No joy. I ordered another PCI I/O card to see if changing brands would make a difference. You guessed it, the same model card arrived, just with another distributor's label. Excellent. This is becoming exciting. I downloaded the latest Sentinel Protection drivers (ver 7), and that didn't help either. Normally it does.
No, we don't use USB dongles here. To get one from the States is probably going to take over a month. The OS is XP Pro-32 SP2 with all the requisite updates and 2 X AMD Model 270 64-bit dual-core Opterons.The photo is of the PCI I/O card that doesn't allow a dongle to be recognised, along with a Sentinel parallel port dongle, similar to the one I'm trying to have detected. It isn't it's fault...I don't think these two will ever be a couple.