Hi Bruce:
Thanx for the advice. I have been pulling my hair out of my head non the less. I dont think the problem is in the fuse config any more. I understand how the fuses work but they are not doing what they are suppose to be doing. not sure why. here is what i am doing. I gave up on the 20MHz resonator and i am using the 4MHz resinator. I set the PLLDIV to 1 so to give me 96 Mhz. I also set the oscillator type to XTPLL and the PLL postscaler to 2. so this should give me 48MHz for the CPU clock. this is all done via the epic programmer.
the Program i am testing is as follows:


define OSC 48

loop:
serout portb.7,2,["test"]
pause 1000
goto loop

now when i run the program the data is not comming in at 9600 but is actually comming in at 115200. I tried replacing XTPLL to HSPLL but no change. I even tried doing OSC 4 and still nothing changed. the program i am using for compiling is microcode studio and the version of my compiler is 2.46. the chip is programmed via an epic programmer with the softwear version of 4.1 beta.
any other help you can give me will be greatly apriciated.
thanx
sam