i have tried what you suggested. I burned your program to the pic and then had the tx of the vinculum to the max232 connected to the pc.
what happened was the pc just printed this:

Ver 03.66-123VDFCF On-Line:

the LED did go high as stated in the program but the vinculum commands seemed that they may not have been recognized.

what do you think is the problem with this? Im running out of clues on why its still not working but i think that the problem is just within the pic microcontroller since the pc had been able to send and receive commands through the max232 or maybe its still the baud rate..

about the hyper terminal's config, yes, it was indeed 9600,8,N,1.