Hi Darrel,
If I couldn't take a little criticism for stupid mistakes, I would never have posted this here.
The switches are specifically setup that way so that the program will only send a MIDI command when there is a change in the switch position, otherwise it would send an on or off command on every cycle. I am using the same code on the 16F628 and it works exactly the way I want it to. I added a command to set the values to 0 (MIDI-Off) on power-up, but it made no difference.
Another thing that I find weird is that if I don't erase the the 16F688 before programming, it comes up with a bunch of errors. I think I'll have to go back to the beginning, start with a few LEDs, then add some switches .... and work my way up from there, just to make sure the chips I have are OK.

Dave