well Shortbus, i agree with ya.

for some reason, i had thought the Proton Dev suite was something special. after dl'ing it and starting it, i see it is not.

PBP and me fav editor, Ultraedit, will still be a team.

JoeS,
i didn't realize how efficient the PBP compiler was. no problem sticking with it and this forum. the Melabs manual is well, a bit odd, but this forum has helped and keeps helping.

for basic & PIC's, i'll stick with the PBP compiler.

i will say i do like the mikroE IDE but from what i can tell it's compiler isn't near as efficient as PBP's. it almost looks like the use the same across their C, pascal & basic compilers, making for a lot of overhead. can't swear to it, but it looks like it on the surface of things.

thanks for the input!