Thanks Jacques Vrey and Keith Howell for your input.

I'm going to write an OCX, using Visual Basic 5 (or a dll) to talk to the
pic, using either the printer port or com 2. The dll  from site
http://www.digibel.org/~wimh/ does really do any particular with the pic.
If com 2 is going to be use, you can use the VBComm ocx to communicate via
the com port.

The question is this, what bits do I need to use (using 16F84) to
communicate and how to communicate with my pc.

Cheers

Paul Phillips
PIC@Colindale.demon.co.uk