Found one of those ghost problems that only seems to occur after days of living with it and finally deciding to go to the Forum and seek and answer....

On my 18F4550, I have been living with 30 second start up times after programming or a reset. As I was typing the question, it occured to me to check if I had put a pull-up on MCLR.....NOPE!

Disabled the reset option and tada! it works just the way the datasheet says it should. Imagine!

Another one for the mental library.
Bo