Programmer Communication Problems

I'm having trouble getting my MPLAB to establish a connection with my programmer. I have a MPLAB ICD module with a serial connection to COM1 on my pc. There is also a phone wire coming out of the module that is connected to a MPLAB ICD demo board that holds the PIC16F877. The demo board is connected to an external power supply. I have MPLAB IDE v8.10 installed on my computer. I selected MPLAB ICD 2 as my programmer and under settings I have COM1 and 19200 as the baud rate. I have PIC16F877 as the device. For the COM port settings on my computer i have 19200 bits/s selected, parity = none, stop bits =1, data bits=8, flow control = hardware. I also deselected the box that says to use FIFO buffers. When I try to go to programmer -> connect it comes up with an error message that says it is unable to connect to MPLAB ICD 2. Does anyone else have any other troubleshooting tips that I can try? Thanks for any help.