After spending 5 minutes trying to work out why, when measuring a voltage across a capacitor, I kept getting a nice blue/orange spark and the PIC resetting, I realised that I was using the probes of my second multimeter which was switched off ,and reading the result on the first - probably explains why everything appeared open circuit as well. Do I pass with honours or special mention? Colin -- cdb, cdb@barnard.name on 31/03/2002 -- http://www.piclist.com hint: The list server can filter out subtopics (like ads or off topics) for you. See http://www.piclist.com/#topics