If your commands are only 4 bytes you might consider collecting all four characters at once before actually looking at any of them. Since you want to waste time, going to a slower baud rate will accomplish the same thing. Even if it's not your favourite solution it may help to prove to yourself that there's nothing wrong with your software UART implementation. It's almost never a good idea to try to implement time delays with PC-based serial ports. There is just too much virtualization between the program and the actual hardware. Recent implementations of Windows have been observed to collect all the carefully delayed characters and then blast them out in one shot. Barry >...the PC talks too fast >for the PIC to both grab the command data and do something with it. Although >the shortest command is only four bytes long they come so fast on the tail >of each other that the swuart misses part of the second byte and I get a >garbled command.... >Slan >John -- http://www.piclist.com hint: To leave the PICList mailto:piclist-unsubscribe-request@mitvma.mit.edu