thanks for the tip. i dl'd two of the code samples from that page, mixed and matched and it still didn't work. i looked too at the melabs pages for the diff's of BS2 and PBP, just in case. but i did get it to work ,,,

0. without setting the values for these, OSC and OSCCON, could not get anything written to the LCD. i set them for 8MHz, as 4MHz would not work. so i looked at section 4.6.1 of the datasheet and set the following...

DEFINE OSC 8
OSCCON= %01110100 ' internal RTC Oscillator freq select
' [bits 6-4 = 8MHz], [bit 2] INTOSC freq stable bit set

1. configuration was set as HS, WDT_ON, PWRT_ON, BOD_ON, MCLR_OFF, PROTECT_OFF

2. the baud rate set using these values, "396 or 16780" didn't work for me. but t2400 does.

thanks for your help!!!!