Finally resolved

The Problem was with the suppliers instructions.
To set up all I had to do was
1. Get the address of the parallel port on the mother board using the bios set up.
2. use more/proc/pci to get the io address and irq for the PCI Card parallel port.
3. insert the following options line into the /etc/modules.conf following the alias parport_pc ... line
options parport_pc io= 0x378,0x9400 irq=none, none
Interestingly it would not work correctly if I specified the irqs. Apparently when you don't the system uses polling and it works better any way.
Regards
Mike