Hi,
Thanks for the suggestions folks. tried them all one by one and got nowhere, then noticed that /MCLR was checked in PicKit 2. Unchecked it and everything worked like a dream ! I then worked backward taking each mod off in turn to see which one had done the trick! Yes, youve guessed it .. the dam thing still worked. I have reintroduced all suggestions again in the hope that this thing shows a tad more reliability, but I'm not holding my breath !

Thanks again
David