Quote Originally Posted by docaberle View Post
Got it. So that means I can never use delay's in code if I'm trying to use ports to receive serial data because that data could easily come in when the pic is processing the delay. Is this correct?
Pretty much.
PICs don't multi-task in the sense that they don't multi-thread. The best you'll get out of a PIC is really fast time-slicing.

Do the hardware UART's have this ability however since they have separate hardware to handle the behind the scenes processing?
Yes, the UARTs have they're own hardware, but you still have to write the code to actually give (or take) the data to the UART for the UART to send and/or receive.

I'm not sure if UART's have to work bidirectionally to transmit and receive to verify data.
UART = Universal Asynchronous Receiver/Transmitter