bruce, thanks for the reply,

i may try to put an NPN on OSC2 to see what's up. but i'm more interested in controlling the PWM driver.

i have the PIC connected to the TLC PWM driver, and it's not working. although it looks like there may be a faint glimmer of life on startup. the thing that gets the PWM going is the GSCLK which i'm attempting to drive with my clockout.
the DS for the TLC says that minimum pulse time for GSCLK is 16ns. i'm way in range there...

will try to slow everything down to make sure my timing is matching what the driver needs.
also thinking about using TMR0 interrupt at 1:16 and toggling my output in the ISR.

by the way, the pins on the TLC i'm concerned about are
GSCLK greyscale clock which the chip uses to time the PWM
BLANK which is toggled at the end/beginning of each 4096 clock period

i hope the CCP1 can work, cause it's so cool.
anybody else use this type of LED controller?