LCD dsiplay driving me up the wall!

[agross]

I am still fairly new to the whole PIC enviorment but not to microcontrollers in general. I have a parallel LCD display 2x16 and am trying to use the LCDOUT commands native to the PIC. I am unsing a PIC 16F687 and no matter what I try the screen stays all solid black boexs. i have checked to make sure the screen is not broken and have tried the screen in other devices I have and it seems to work fine. I have only changed one varible in the definitions at the begining of the program and that is the enable pin (I changed it to PORTB.4) other than that I simply want to display "hello" on the LCD screen. all 8 lines of my code are posted below if anyone has a suggestion as to how I can get some letters to display on my screen please I am open to all suggestions. FYI the screen is a powertip PC1602c screen. Much thanks for any info on this subject. As an add on, I know the LCD display I'm using has an 8 bit bus and the default LCD command uses a 4 bit bus, but I would be perfectly happy using only one line on my display as long as I can use it.

DEFINE LCD_EREG PORTB 'set LCD enable port
DEFINE LCD_EBIT 4

Loop:

pause 500
lcdout $FE,2, "hello"
pause 500

Goto Loop

END