Hello Christopher,

I see a couple of things. To make the USART work on the '4550 the manual says that both the RX and TX pins need to be configured as inputs, so add
Code:
TRISC.7 = 1
TRISC.6 = 1
If you're having trouble, try remming out the first six lines under mainloop, from the if to the endif, just to confirm that the port is working asynchronously.

For synchronous operations, TRISC.7 needs to be set to 0.

Best Regards,
Paul