LCD showing mostly jibberish on 16F716

[davewanna]

All is good. I'm just glad I'm able to shift some of the blame from myself to Microchip in this instance.. haha

Thanks for all the help anyway circuit now working like it should, now back to finishing the code....

[Ryan7777]

Your open pins were probably acting like little antennas and picking up something nearby on occasion that just happened to be what the pic was expecting as an OSC frequency, hence the occasional flicker of life . Floating pins on PICs can do some pretty weird stuff, or on logic chips of any sort.

Glad you got it sorted!