perhaps someone can chime in what the true definition of ANSEL funtion is - ie is it purely related to the AtoD functionality or does it mean 'analogue' in general?
I thought I answered this in the previous post. In any case, ANSEL controls whether the respective PIC inputs are set to analog or digital. It does not care about the ADC. Other registers allow you to decide whether the respective analog input is used for the ADC or the Comparator, or ...

In your case you lucked out because even though you did not set the inputs to analog, you had already squared up the inputs to make them sort of digital.