Andy,

more memory (Code and RAM) was one of the major reasons for migrating from 16F876 to 18F252.

I have been running the 18F252 or 18F452 on VeroBoard (kind of)
in some projects and not experienced any problems so far eventhough the 18Fs are ment to be more "critical" than the 16Fs.
(Well, those Boards are not being used in a noisy environment)

For an example see:

http://www.picbasic.co.uk/forum/show...=&threadid=639

regards.