Back in harness after the Brussels trip. The light show in the city square was absolutely fantastic.. bet they weren't using 877's. I have spent another fruitless day finally junking the 877 circuit and deciding to use a 16F 628A which is what successfully controls my smaller Xmas star (which is flashing even as we speak). You kow what the &*(*^)(& 628A didn't work either. I then programmed it with the program which is operating the other star and that doesn't work either. So ..... Jerry it looks as if you may have hit the nail on the head and this wretched EPIC programmer is the cause of the problem. It seems to be programming OK there is certainly hex code there which I can read back and verify OK. Is the Epic programmer really that bad that it can apparently program and verify but still screw up the code in some way. Being retired I am not keen on going out to buy another programmer (they seem to be a hell of a lot dearer now). The only other thing I can think of is that the transformer I am using to power it is inadeque. It is nominal 15 vdc but the multimetwr tells me it is 21.9 volts on no load and drops to 20 when connected to the EPIC