Hi Melanie,
Ya . . . actually I wasn't really in the planning stage yet, the psudo code posted was to give clarity to what I was attempting to do. As I understand it a pic cannot look at 2 simultanious inputs and make a descision based on that information. What I have tenitively decided to do is use a 7442 bcd decoder as switch decoder and buffer and use 1 pin of the pic as an interrupt input to clear the variables of all my for next counter loops(whichever one is running) if that will work. I am still too inexperienced in programming to know without trying if it will. I figure that's what breadboards are for. So I think my real question is, can a counter loop be decremented faster by code from outside the loop or by an interrupt driven event?

Thank You again,
JS