Thanks to all for your suggestions. None of them worked, though I appreciate your diligent efforts. Even worse, during my thrashing around in attempting yet another fix, the radio locked up in Memory mode, and nothing I attempted worked except the Mono button which somehow kicked the receiver into the frequency for a local hard rock station.
Let not your hearts be troubled, however: using and old XP machine and making sure I had the proper Prolific driver, I went to the Baofeng UV-5R user group and looked up Hard Reset. None of the tips worked, either, until I guessed that perhaps loading the Baofeng software might influence things. After doing that and interpreting something that was mentioned in passing on one of the posts and giving it a whirl by inserting a new file [an .img file, perhaps? This concept is not explained anywhere I could find but I think it is what I did], the whole thing came alive!
I have concluded that my radio works with the Baodeng software only and that the cloning cable works in XP [using the XP driver] rather than in Windows 7 using the Vista driver. I have programmed a half dozen repeaters into memory and saved it so the next time at least I won't have to start from scratch.
In summary, the software [beta, gamma, delta ??] from Baofeng is useable, XP is OK, and I am happy. Thanks again and best of luck.
Regards,
Madison W5MJ
-----Various Responses-----
From: km9m-zig@comcast.net Subject: Re: [chirp_users] Radio still does not respond
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try plugging the programming cable into a different usb port.
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Welcome to the world of windows hidden files and the hardware hive.
Too bad its been this way for generations.
W6ARH
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If you change com ports, the correct driver needs to be reloaded to the new port.
I believe that?s what you are experiencing.
John K3NXU