Sphere, Is your card reader communicating in RS232 or Wiegand? HID readers come in both flavors and some will do both. The other thing that stood out in your post was that you're running your PIC at 4 Mhz. A lot of card readers default to 9600 baud. Using the rule of clock rate divided by 400, that would seem to be a bit too "hairy edge" for my tastes. I'd go up to 8Mhz or even 20Mhz. Let us know how it works out.