Hi Chris,
As long as it works I have no problems and, like I said, "erasing" the individual characthers sounds like the best solution.

Sounds like a fun project! Be careful, lots of power there!

Since your chip has a USART and you're laready using it to communicate with a PC (by the looks of it) I'm assuming the board has a MAX232 or similar device so why not use a bootloader to get the code into the PIC? (And next time, put a ICSP header on there...)

As for the RPM, since you apparently aren't interested in direction and/or position why not run one of the A/B channels of the encoder to a timer/counter input and configure the appropriate timer in the PIC as a counter. Read it at every TMR1 interrupt and you have motor speed.

/Henrik.