folks, thank you all for your efforts to help me out. the reality is that BENTON seems to have it correct. the cable i purchased was directly from baofeng. i believe that the source was china b/c when i wrote them they told me i bought it 14 mo.s ago and that it was listed as 'works w/ win vista, win7, win 8' and was never listed as for win 10. i pointed out that win 10 did not exist when i bought the cable! clearly, they have used a CLONE of the ftdi chip and, as benton noted, the drivers which FTDI loaded into my PC w/o my knowledge or permission was designed to send TRASH to my cable and render it inoperable! i proved that by using a friend's cable and it worked fine w/ my UV-5RTP; but, my cable on HIS pc is useless. the device mgr sees the cable but does NOT get thru it to see the radio. i asked baofeng if tthey would write code to FIX the cable since it is their shared fault for using a clone in the first place. they didnt respond to that message. now, i have reviewed about 15 programming cables; all - EXCEPT one - are less than $6; oNE is $20 and it is marked 'genuine FTDI cable'. so, i kknow that i could resolve this for 20 bucks. but i am pissed that FTDI trashed something i purchasedd in good faith FROM the manufacturer!! so, i was hoping someone had the expertise to write code to send to my cable to make it functional again.
thanks again to you all for your input; however, i'm afraid that i'm still out in left field............. peace, larry KD9AVZ