Well my development board is setup to have the ability to run on many osscillator types. All I have to do is set a switch on the board and change some configuration settings in my programming software. I actually tried changing the oscillator and I still got the exact results that I had before.

I think that the idea of having data received in the background using a hardware buffer uart is a good idea in principle anyway. I will just have to spend a few hours and comb over the 140 page data sheet for that pic chip.

Thanks for your help