Hi again,
Got the porta I/O proble sorted insofar as i can now switch on any of the a port bits and light an led. Or so I thought, I wrote a program which switched on each bit of the port in turn held it with a pause 500 command and then switched it off and so on. When writing te Christmas star program I wrote simple code tp switch on all of the bits of PortA (they are each connected through Darlingtons to the - line of one of 16 arms (the other 8 are driven from portc by identical code (other than the port id). Now what happens is that only pins 4 6 and 8 remain high (leds lit). I have now written a separate little piece of code to test it. If I switch each pin on in turn pausing between each one (but not switching them off ) then led 0 switches on and after the specified delay it switches off and the next one comes on. only when I get to pins 4 6 and 8 do they stay switched on. Another curiousity which may be a clue is that when I compile and program the pickit2 comes on with a lower Vdd(about 3.8 and I have to turn it up again. I have also removed the darlingtons so there are only leds an port A but it has made no difference. If anyone can spot whatever my latest stupid mistake is I would be very grateful. BTW the reason I could'nt originally use pins 6 an7 was that [I] had my knickers in a twist thinking I was programming with MPASm when in fact I was using the default !!