Vladimir,
                thanks for the reply. I did try Steve's code change
but without the NOP and it worked fine. I dont have any real 'cable'
length. I have the PIC on a piece of stripboard (parallel strips of
copper connector providing buses in one direction) and the LCD is
attached directly to the board about 6cm away. I suspect that the
copper strips are sufficiently capacitive to cause the problem.

Changing the read code to gather the data when E is asserted solves
the problem so thanks to Steve and to you for confirming

Brian
Brian Jones
Java Technology Centre
IBM Hursley