Doh, silly me...
U7 handles some of the parallel port, keyboard,joy/mouse port and some parts of the floppy.
U8 does the rest of the parallel port, some other floppy port bits, and the serial port.
It`s not 100% possible to check the parallel port is working without plugging something in.
You can write data to the port and read it back to see if that side of the chip works, but you can`t tell if the data actually went out the other side intact without having something there to read/use it.
As for Alice, it sounds like something is shorting out..
Actually, check for shorts around pins 11 and/or pin 21 on the U7 CIA, as they go to Alice. Maybe the CIA problem is causing the Alice problem too :-(
