Thanks once again.

I have to hold my hand up & say I'm getting a little forgetful nowadays....

it's been a bit of a long journey & during the many twists & turns, I'd forgot that a few weeks ago, I was actually using the HSEROUT command, with my PIckit2 programmer as the 'glue' between my PIC & my PC (http://www.picbasic.co.uk/forum/showthread.php?p=73184 ...though in that thread, you'll see for that particular 'moment in time' I aborted the HSEROUT route in favour of using DEBUG...but I can't use DEBUG anymore due to the high number of interrrupts my program is having to handle - also, I never did get to the bottom of why the command hserout ["Hello World", 10,13] only line feeds intemittently!

This HSEROUT/Pickiit2 method obviously does use hardware to get data out of the PIC (as opposed to the software based DEBUG command method), so I'm hoping that revisiting that aspect tonight will yield good results with the heavy amount of encoder wheel black stripe interupts!