My testing indicates that Microchip's MPASMWIN assembler does produce hex and coff files even though the program exceeds the available code space. The program is truncated when this is the case. It does generate a warning message, but the "Build Succeeded" result is a bit misleading.

As for the reason that the program grew when compiled with 2.60, I will be happy to investigate if you will post your program or send it directly to the support address at melabs.

One of the common causes for larger code with 2.60 is the change we made to the READ and WRITE commands. This causes the commands to use more code space when many READs and WRITEs are used to handle individual bytes, but can be made more efficient if the new features are utilized to write multiple bytes with single commands.