Some good suggestions, and good points. Especially inside Europe local laws can really handicap you. For instance you can't just pretend to be a business in Belgium to become an RS customer - they need your VAT and business registration. Buying from the US can be ridiculous when importing to Belgium - even if they don't change you any VAT they will levy a Eur10 inspection fee.

I'm a little bit fortunate in that I finally found the one (?) electronics shop in Belgium who has a reasonable range and can usually suggest alternatives.

Digikey and Futurelectronics are great - if you are US based.

Anyway - getting off track a little bit And to solve my original problem, i'll just go to a 16F777 which I can get locally. I was just looking for the smallest and cheapest controller with 3 hardware PWM modules for controlling some LEDs.