AUSART and Max232

    Having another nice Saturday.  I've been trying to get the built-in AUSART circuit working.  Had an odd bug with the RS232 level converter chip.  The one I'm using is from Sipex ( courtesy of sparkfun.com ).  The docs for all these converters want 4-5 0.1uF caps.  When I hook up the caps on V- and V+, it was causing my pic to reset over and over.  What I would see was something like:
( trying to send "Hello, world!" to PC ) HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHeHHHHHHellHHHHHello, world!HHHHHHHHHHHHH
    I got this to work in a couple of ways.  The first way was to disconnect the caps to V- and V+.  I'm really not enough of an electrical engineer type to know if this is harmful.  I decided to go Luddite.  I found a great diagram of a fast RTL inverter on Free Circuit Diagrams.  They work great.  Sparkfun has some variations on this.  They sell a serial cable with this kind of inverter built in.  They add a couple of capacitors to ground, though.  This setup produces voltages between 0 and ~5V.  This is enough on my PC to trigger the rs232 correctly.  It may not work on all PCs, though.  I think the threshold is supposed to be between around +/- 3.8 V. 
    I can now send RS232 chars to my PC and output the same on the LCD.  Now I need to create a buffer and receive chars, print to LCD, and confirm each line from a hex file.  Not sure if I'll actually do an MD5 checksum calculation on each line or not.  Need some way to check if I got what I should without sacrificing too much time.  We'll see.