bluetooth help

Has anyone used Bluetooth devices with MinGW compiled programs? I can perform a bluetooth scan and I can see devices, but calling connect() fails with a bad port/address message. I have a valid bluetooth address that I have verified exists in the address structure with a hex dump. I also know the bluetooth device is reachable in Windows as I can use PuTTY to connect to the COM port and talk to the device just fine. It seems like the connect doesn't even try to reach the device as I have tried to connect when the device is not paired in windows and I never receive a pair prompt. Pairing the device manually doesn't help connect work though. I have run out of ideas to what the cause of the failure is and Windows documentation is very lacking. Thanks for any help, Michael