Hi Dave,

Well spotted mate,

Also just for anyone else who has similar problems:

in the epic I am using the code protect keeps defaulting to be on,

so during spending days trying just about everything and when verifying the code had be written correctly I was getting the obvious message code programming error, if the epic software cant read the code then for sure it will not match. maybe a bug in epic that needs to be set, if code protect is on then dont try to validate the written code because for sure it will fail.

Thanks again dave, I now have a blinking led on the pic at various rates to visually see the pic is running..