the USB to serial adapter is giving me 5V on the control lines (RTS, DTR) so i'm assuming it's a cheep and nasty..

Having said that, now that i've had some sleep... i could write a pic program to sequentially spit out 0 to 255 (DEC) and use realterm to display the binary of what it receives... this will tell me if it's a hardware setup problem or if it's an inversion problem (or both). i'm also going to drop the baud to something ridiculously low... realterm does bauds as low as 110...

I'm going to be putting in an order with crownhill for a load of 18F4550's probably towards the end of the week along with some other items and wire etc...

What i want is not to use HSER commands and use an interrupt based comms handler, but untill i sort this problem...

thanks