Too right I'm struggling.

The board is going through the motions of erasing and rewriting to the PIC.

Could someone send me a .pbp or plain text basic listing for say the 12F509 in PBP3 just to see where I am going wrong.

the manual just doesn't seem to have any tutorials and the example programs just don't work.

All I want to do is to set TRISA to 000000 and then to POKE and output to it to see an LED illuminate. Everything that I have tried so far has come up with a syntax error - including the examples that come with the program.

The manuals seem to be written by experts for experts. I'm an old man trying to learn new tricks.