E-3 with a studio strobe?

I am not familiar with that strobe. Does it offer optical firing? Do you have any RF triggers?

We know the cable works since it you shorted the connector. Do you have another flash that can be hooked with a cable, Olympus FL's does not have that but another third party might.

I use radio triggers to fire my strobes (Adorama's Flashpoints or FL50's in manual)

The big question have you ever used the pc connector on the E3 with another flash. I ask that because it may have been broke from day 1. I had a printer (in the age of 8088 CPU's) that I bought that had parallel and also serial interface. At the time the computer only had serial but when I upgraded to a parallel card it did not work but was out of warranty by then. We were able to trace it to faulty chip. That why I asked that question.

Ciao,

Lou Cioccio