David,

I tried you suggestion and it worked perfectly.  To recap for others: If
you are using MPASM and want to program your PIC with the Micro
Engieeering Labs EPIC programmer & software you must explicitly set the
configuration bits.  For my app. this was:

__CONFIG   _CP_OFF&_XT_OSC&_PWRTE_ON&_WDT_OFF

With an appropriate line like above in the code, the MEL EPIC software
does fine. You do however have to manually choose the processor type ( a
single click ) before programming (see below).

With your explanation of the HEX code I was able to do some empirical <g>
testing and found that the word at 0x2008 sets the EPIC programming
software to default to a processor type.  The 1 made it default to an
"84".  By addng the

      org  0x2008
      data 1

lines, it made the programmer default just as if you had used code
assembled by their assembler.  I found that adding the org and data lines
were not necessary if you manually choose the processor type on their
software's screen so since I don't understand any possible consequences of
a word at that address, I prefer (for now) to just manually choose the
processor type.  Is there any reason NOT to have the lines of code above?

Thanks very much to Mr. Tait for the excellent help!  Saved me a lot of
time.

Scott