Hi Gadelhas, Thanks for your help. Let me assure you first I am completely new to this. Just started learning it yesterday.

I understand your examples, but I am still confused.

I have it reading the serial port now. I have a button set up that when I press it, it sends a char to the pic, and the pic responds with 18 bytes. This seems to work good, everytime I press the button.

What I want to do is set up a timer(I think I can do that based on examples found surfing) to "press the button for me" every 100mS or so.

So the "form1_load" section is where the start of the program is?

I really don't understand how the code "flows". All the beginner tutorals seem to be the same thing: add a button, add a textbox. Add code in the button event to put text in the text box.
None explain how the overall code is executed. Please see that I think in terms of coding a PIC. ie: there is a main loop, inside the loop we check things and gosub or goto different parts of the code, then we get back to the main and return to the beginning. we may even have interrupts that will stop what is happening and run some other code, then return to what it was doing before.

So to me all the button events are like the sub-routines, that get called when we press the button. but where do they return to?

If I used the examples you gave, will the "code" just hang out in lala land until a byte is received?

Am I thinking too hard?