>It is good practise to put some 'standard' routine in all
>your programs to make sure the RAM is in a known state before
>your program starts chugging away.



Indeed,  My SOP is to init all ram with zeroes, then fill all buffers
with 1,2,3 (ie: buffer1 all = 1 etc) which aids in debugging, so I can
see where the buffers are.
Finally, all ram variables are initted to some rational value
depending on the application.

I do this init this way, hoping that if I ever am scatterbrained
enough to use uninitialized ram, either it will work, because the
value I set it to happens to be right, or it will crash 100% of the
time, and I will fix it. Either way, I win :)