Hank,

At the end of the day all Mach3 etc do is send pulses and direction info to the stepper... for a winder presumably all you need to decide is the speed of rotation and the number of turns... If you know that one turn = 200 steps then the rest is simple math. Wind 500 turns at 10rpm = 500 x 200 = 100,000 steps at 33 steps/second. A purpose made program to do this is very simple. The only tricky bit is getting access to the parallel port under Windows... for that you will need to load a device driver that makes the raw port hardware visible to a Windows program (DLLIOPort is one such utility, I use it to drive a PIC programmer - same technique of sending controlled pulses). What programming languages do you use/know? If you want more info on how its done let me know.