After I made the initial post to this thread I continued my "research". I now understand that the MCSP ICD and the Microchip ICD are two completely different animals. But recent posts still have me puzzled. I have kept the MC ICD page bookmarked and I recently reviewed the information presented thereon. The only mention of a bootloader is that MCSP now includes a free bootloader that enables the user to program certain PICs without a hardware programmer. There is no mention of any bootloader being required to get the ICD to work reliably. I use the MELabs USB programmer and do almost all my programming using ICSP and it works very nicely.

All that said, I must admit that I have not actually had a chance to try the experiment again. I've been living with DEBUG statments but I can surely see the advantages of MCSP ICSD if only I could get it to work on something other than simple programs.

Does anyone really know if a bootloader is the answer?

Thanks everyone. Mark