I recently put together my NerdKit temperature sensor project and wanted to see the uart output on my computer. I was then surprised that Vista doesn't ship with HyperTerminal anymore! I downloaded RealTerm from sourceforge. It worked, but I found the GUI cluttered and it kept throwing AVs. In response, I threw a VERY simple program together and posted it on my site so anybody that wants a copy can grab it (including Delphi source) - www.raymarron.com/delphi. A direct link to the file is www.raymarron.com/delphi/nerdcomm.zip.

I bet with a little tinkering you could integrate that with the programmer's notepad so you could open the terminal from the menu.

I also have my term script here

Nice! Stuff like Perl & Python are super handy, and the same source usually works on most OSes with little or no changes.