LCD will not start

[skimask]

Ski, I might have pulled the PIC while the power is on. Also, I might have pulled a wire while powered on. I am using a breadboard wire that I like because they are more flexible and easy to insert but I wondered could high current be generated with "loose" connection? Hehehe... I have done my testimony. Guilty for the dead of my pic? Hahahaha..... I would play with the pic16f84a tonight and catch up with you and Joe.
Regards,
JohnPaul

Every 'wire', every circuit trace, everything, is an inductor of sorts, a small one, but an inductor nonetheless. You open a closed circuit, what little magnetic field that had been developed along a specific traces, collapses and induces a voltage (which in turn has a current), and that voltage/current has to go somewhere, usually to ground, sometimes thru a part to ground.
So, I don't think it's the fact that you had 'high current' with that loose connection, I think it would be more to the fact that you might've been jiggling a loose connection causing some really small arcs to occur and putting voltage spikes on whatever wire you were hooked up to.

And there's really nothing wrong with the ol' white, solderless breadboards and those wires that go with them....so long as you realize their limitations as far as frequency and durability go. They don't really like high frequencies, much above about 10Mhz or so because of the parasitic capacitance, causes those nice sharp edges on square waves to get rounded off. And the connections tend to open up and get looser over time.
Keep that in mind while your using those boards, replace them once in awhile, like a few of us around here have started doing, and you'll be alright...
I used to use the large boards, the ones with 3,220 points. I chucked that one and got a handful of the smaller 800 point boards. Much cheaper to replace one of those than the big ones.