Communication problem

I have one if tose Chinese RepRap clones (Omni M-505 - Prusa I-3) and suddenly have a problem communicating with the system via the direct link provided via the program setups. When I try to connect through the USB connection, I get an error.
The screen shot from Pronterface shows the communication as being a bunch of gibberish.

If I use the bare bones interface I get the following:

Most of the information I have read says this is usually a mismatch in communication rates. The default rate for the firmware (Repetier) is 115200
and that is what is set in the machine settings in Repetier and Pronterface.

I can still function using offline mode but I do some things with Pronterfacce and would like to correct the problem.

Try 250000 baud. That is what my Chinese clone was set to and is the default for Marlin at least. I changed it to 115200 when I installed my own changes via Marlin.

I tried that baud rate with no luck. This problem suddenly appeared. The printer was working with the out-of-box settings. I had used the manual
control function of the Repetier program several times successfully at 115200. When I tried the program again to manually reposition the print table, I was unable to establish a connection between the computer and the printer.

I suspect that the firmware got corrupted somehow. I'm trying to learn how to update the firmware but progress is slow. I am a user with very little Arduino knowledge and the instructions tend to be rather cryptic to me. The discussions are more programmer to programmer and I get lost quickly.

I suppose it's possible that this could be caused by the new M$ FTDI drivers which refuse to function on counterfeit FTDI chips. Since it happened out of the blue, it could have been a windows update. The only way I could think of to check would be try to connect with a linux machine.

I'm running this on WInXP so I doubt it is due to an update. I also tried using my WIn10 notebook and got the same errors. That points to a problem with the board/firmware.