solarwind wrote:
> Yes I did tie it to ground.
>   
Ok, let's back up here....

First, let me say that I have spent weeks hunting down a floating pin 
problem on a 16f886... and everything which you have been told pin-wise 
is 100% accurate.   Plus, there are other pins on the '886 that need to 
be tied up/down or set differently which aren't immediately obvious.   
Or, in other words, setting the tris direction registers to output may 
not be enough to actually set everything correctly on an '886.   In my 
case, I had missed that the LVP fuse was not actually being set.  On 
another PIC processor, it was some weirdness with one of the "other 
functions" on one of the ports which needed to be disabled before I 
could set the port to an output.

Please verify the following:

That the vdd pin is tied to +5V
That the vss pins (there are two of them) are tied to GND.
That mclr is pulled high through a 47K resistor to VCC.
That LVP is disabled in fuses, and ideally the LVP pin is pulled low 
through a resistor.
That you are using the INTERNAL OSCILLATOR, not an external XTAL or 
other clock source (if you are not using the intosc, then there are 
other questions as well).

That should cover the basics which should be the same on all 
schematics.   How you connect the remaining pins really depends on what 
you are wanting to do with the PIC.  HOWEVER, what people have been 
trying to tell you is that your hand-waving is actually enough to change 
the value of one or more pins on the PIC since the inputs are so 
sensitive to voltage variations.    And in some cases, the value is 
actually not fully on or fully off, but in-between, which causes all 
sorts of weirdness.

The good engineering way to solve this problem is to add 10K resistors 
from each of the unused pins to either VCC or GND.  This will ensure the 
circuit will operate no matter what the settings of the PIC are.

Trust me, and others, when we say that there are *lots* of causes for 
this, and there is no way to know what the cause is without trying.   
The other option is to go completely through the datasheet and read how 
to set *every* pin to a digital output.  And there are lots of pins 
which the answer is more than setting the tris appropriately.

-forrest
-- 
http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive
View/change your membership options at
http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist