Thanks Joe. I'll try the spacing correction and the NOPs eventually, I hope. Now I am bogged down in some very mysterious compilation problems. I'll get a list of compilation errors about unrecognized symbols, but the symbols are "TRISIO" and "ADCON0" and "GPIO." And the really wierd part is that once these errors pop up they do not go away. I can delete the supposedly offending piece of code (whatever I last added to the program) and the errors remain. And they persist even when I erase more and more code. I have to cut and replace almost the entire program before the errors cease. I may start a new post about this with the code and everything if I do not find a solution in the next few days. Man...this project just keeps spiraling down...

By the way, I have tried the OPTION_REG line with the 4th bit high and low--seems to make no difference as the timer is off in both cases.