Hi,

Since you are using a PIC with hardware serial peripheral I suggest you use the hardware port if (your port pins are not used up). Even if your global interrupt is not set to handle interrupts (INTCON.7) the hardware flags inside the PIC always responds to an interrupt event. So you can just

1. Poll the bit PIR1.5 (RCIF) for a 1 and if yes then
2. Read the RCREG register to your own variable MySerialData = RCREG
(Note the interrupt flag RCIF gets cleared once you read the data)
3. Do your stuff
4. Go back to the polling.

Important to not that while you are processing and data can be grabbed by the module but if it is flooded again with data and you have not read the RCREG register then the overrun bit would be set which can be cleared by resetting and setting the CREN (continuos receive enable) bit.

With Mister_e's PICMULTICALC utility configuring the registers for the hardware USART peripheral should not be any problem.