"Upon further review" I found that the owin / owout is not causing this weirdness. It seems to be the result of using serout2. I switched ports around, etc, and found that when I have the serial out on the same port as my test LED, that is when the on/off problem occurs. Moving the statement around in the program has no effect.

I guess I will simply just dedicate one port to the serout2 command, and do everything else on a different port. Thankfully I have spare pins available for what I need to do

Ken