OK. I have it working pretty good with the dummy receives after each tx to catch the junk and prevent overun. Every once in a while though it gets caught up in itself probably from missing a readding and then over running the buffer. How can I check to see if I am in error state before proceeding to the next set of instructions?

somehting like this won't work (will it) since I am not using the hardware USART
OERR VAR RCSTA.1 ' Alias OERR (USART Overrun Error Flag)

I am using a PIC18F2220 with the internal osc. What would be the way of setting up and checking for an error state and what would be the best way to clear it. With all these dummy serin statements my code space is going to get tight...

Thanks for all the help thus far. I think I am almost there!