Bluefruit EZ-Link refuses to connect

[DelEngineer]

But that was enough to work with after abandoning the idea of everything "just working". I was able to manually create an outgoing COM port and that has been working even after rebooting the PC. Thank you Adafruit support staff for helping me get working components.

Can I ask for a bit more detail in your solution? I'm having literally exactly the same problem: all three serial ports appear to always be occupied. CSR dongle was replaced, but problem persists. No hidden serial ports, and the shield isn't the defective model number. The shield isn't defective because Macbooks can connect to the shield exactly as expected.