Bruce, I may have stumbled onto part of my problem. I checked the switch interface more closely and discovered that the wire I was inserting into a female header that was connected to RA2 from the switch was not making good contact. Now when I check the voltage on RA2 pin when it is open output it reads 3.2 vdc. Still a long ways from VDD or Vih, but yet when I now depress the switch I am getting TMR0 count values. However, I notice that only 3-4 depressions of the switch causes TMR0 to obviously exceed the K value and trigger the ELSE block where it is written to memory and then cleared. I presume that this means there is a lot of switch bounce on the momentary switch depressions, each bounce being counted as a pulse by TMR0. Yet I can't figure out why it even works when the RA2 voltage transitions are only from 3.2 volts to ground. Any ideas?
Maybe Interrupts would still be the better approach to do the counting, where the interrupt would trigger on the first switch closure and should ignore the switch bounces while further interrupts are disabled during the Int-handler. What do you think?