After reading this and many other osccal posts, i thought i should mention an observation. as a newbie using a jdm programmer and free software off the net, i've found that several of these free software packages do NOT copy and restore the osccal! they simply erase it. as most of you pros use commercial programmers and software, you may not have noticed. the very first thing i did with my new programmer to the free 12f629 that came with it was erase it. figured it was new, nothing on it, safe move. lol yes, it erased the osccal value. when i get home next week i think i'll go through all those programs i tried and make a list of which ones erase osccal.