Is it just my imagination (poor engineering skills?) or is
mplab the worst piece of software available?

Here's the situation:
I'm writing drivers for four seven segment displays multiplexed
on 12 i/o pins. Simple right? Of course it is. Unfortunatly, I
find more often then not, when a computer is involved nothing is
as simple as it should be. Single stepping through the program
works. The tris registers say what they should, (all
lows) port's a and b say what they should, things turn off.
things turn on. things loop. it all works perfect.

The problem:
It doesn't work in my circuit.  The program I wrote to test the
display should count from 0 to 9999. However, it doesn't. It just
stays on zero. Constnatly outputing 4 zeros.  I modified the
source, and did a "build all" in an attempt to start it at 7777
instead of 0, which should have had it outputing all 7's. But it
doesn't. Still all zeros. All the time.

Clues:
When single steping in debug it all looks ok. The registers (4
binary values, which get compacted into BCD values, which then
get converted to the proper led code, and the tris registers) all
do what they should. The only thing that isn't "normal" is at
certain points, when I right click on a section of code to be
able to do a "run to here" sometimes the "run to here" option is
faded. Which usually means you're NOT on a peice of code. But I
clearly am.


I've been pulling hair out in frustration all afternoon. Anyone
have idea's where I should be looking for the problem?

-Shane.