Thank you both for the info. Sorry I forgot to mention it earlier, I am using a 18F2525 which has a USART. Now I must admit that my knowledge is extremely limited at this time because I know next to nil about assembly except that it's not a lot of fun and quite complicated when I did try learning it a couple years ago.

I haven't played with interrupts yet, but I'll be starting with those next week if not today. When you say poll the interrupt bit, bare with me, you mean set portb.2, for example, as an interrupt, read in the character when one is detected into a byte of my array (in this case RX[#]) and continue doing so until I get the last character? Also, I presume I can use another interrupt and hopefully set one as a higher priority than the other?

Is there an example somewhere on using the counter on the PIC? Haven't had a lot of luck searching on the Net. Or is that used in conjunction with the COUNT command? I want to make sure that any time I receive a pulse from the encoder that it gets counted, this will be a priority over everything else.

Again, thank you both for your advice.