Hi,
But it seems to me that if you use the "@ sleep", doesn't the PIC go to sleep perminantly, unless "interrupted" awake??
Yes, if the WDT is disabled and no interrupt occurs it will sleep "permanently" but SLEEP will make it do the same thing under those circumstances.

Whereas if you use the PBP SLEEP you need to specify how many seconds.
Correct, but like I said, it doesn't actually sleep for 60 seconds straight (or whatever) it sleeps for one WDT period (around 2 seconds I think), wakes up, goes to sleep for one WDT period, wakes up, goes to sleep and so on untill the accumulated sleep time equals 60 seconds (or whatever). If the WDT was disabled it would go to sleep and never wake up because the "alarm clock" is disabled.

Also if you use the PBP SLEEP command It cannot be interrupted awake until the completion of the sleep time period?
That's probably true for ON INTERRUPT. It's likely NOT the case when using DT-INTS or ASM interrupts where a real hardware interrupt is actually tripped.

Really, the PBP statement SLEEP uses the assembler instruction SLEEP in a loop. It calculates the number of WDT periods needed for the specified number of seconds then it goes to sleep, wakes up, counts down, determines if it's done and if not it goes back to sleep. Because ON INTERRUPT doesn't generate a real interrupt (it just polls the interrupt flag before the SLEEP statement and then again after the SLEEP statement) it won't "see" the "interrupt" untill the 60 seconds have passed (same as ON INTERRUPT with ANY PBP statement really).

My ultimate goal is to get the PIC to sleep and ONLY wake up if PortA.3 or PortA.4 is taken low OR if 60 seconds has elapsed. A.3 and A.4 are pushbuttons and I would like decent response time on these buttons so I may have to use the PBP "NAP" statement and take say 120 x 500ms naps.
See above, use DT-INTS or interrupts in pure ASM - it should work.
With that said I'm not sure which PICs have any sort of interrupt capabilities on PortA.3 and PortA.4. Obviously you need to connect the buttons to inputs which is capable of generating an interrupt or make an wired OR circuit or whatever to PortB.0.

/Henrik.