Thanks for your comments guys. I've not had a lot to do with Kermit, and it had never registered with me that you could use it just as a terminal emulator. For some reason I had always thought of it as just(?) a complete file transfer package - ah well, you live and learn :) I've also now found the real cause of the original problem. The makers of the kit I was trying to link were cheapskates and instead of using a proper serial chip, they used a diode-resistor-capacitor trick to level shift 0-15V swings to +-7V (ish). However, there was a dry joint on the diode so it took qute a few cycles before it had built up the DC offset - hence the first few characters being missing. The fact that TeraTerm was exhibiting (apparently) similar behaviour totally threw me off the track :(
