Myke, I'm probably not of much help other than to suggest the obvious
which you already know:

   1. What's MCLR tied to?
   2. Any noise on the supply rails?
   3. Is this on a plug-in breadboard? That adds capacitance.
   4. Is it a parallel resonance crystal?
   5. What Oscillator mode are you using?
   6. Is LVP enabled? If so, what's on RB3?

   I recently upgraded a 16C77 prototype to a 16F877 (using ES samples)
and I've had no problems running at 20MHz with 18pf caps at 5Vdd. I'm using
a microEngineering Labs PicProto64 board.

   - Tom

At 12:59 AM 9/23/99 -0400, Myke Predko wrote:
>Hi Folks,
>
>I've been playing around with a sample 16F877 and I am having problems with
>not getting a reliable start up.  I'm trying to run it at 4 MHz (using a
>crystal and two 15 pF caps).  The operation of the oscillator seems to be
>hit or miss (mostly miss).  I've played around with different parts (I've
>tried a ceramic resonator, different values for the capacitors) and still
>nothing that is reliable.  I have not tried an in-line resistor.
>
>Has anybody else seen this type of problem and if you did, what did you do
>to fix it?
>
>Thanx,
>
>myke


------------------------------------------------------------------------
Tom Handley
New Age Communications
Since '75 before "New Age" and no one around here is waiting for UFOs ;-)