Got it - thanks Henrik (and Darrel). I've been playing around with Mr E's multi-calc with various OSC & freq values - I never know there were upper limits to duty cycles before and that they depended on the prescaler as well. All of this is hidden if using pbp's PWM or HPWM, but I want to get into the down-and-dirty of PWM registers to really understand this stuff (besides, it's fun). For the motor spinning up aspect, I had read that it's not good to do something like this:

Code:
For dutyval = 0 to 255
    HPWM 1, dutyval, 16000
Next dutyval
because the HPWM command changes more than just the duty cycle register values. Plus, on my PIC16F1824 I want to use CCP3 & CCP4 which you can't do with pbp's HPWM.