Oh nice. I'm happy to help out where I can.
Feel free to start a new thread with your questions, and Iink me to it and I'll help wherever I can.
As for dumping the firmware, the tool in this thread might possibly work on your computer as it is DOS based.
The NVRAM dump is only that, the Firmware is a second thing that is dumped out seperately.
For the GPIB connection, try disabling anything and everything that's not needed in your BIOS (serial ports, parallel ports, etc) to remove possibility for addressing conflicts.
Then also do a factory reset on your scope to make sure there's no hidden settings messing things up.