I missed that point.

However, the strangest thing I remember about my experience of putting the wrong capacitors on XTAL1/XTAL2 is that the program was executing very slowly, "sort of": I had a LED that was supposed to flash quickly and I initially thought it was just dead/stuck on. Then as I was thinking, it turned off about half a minute later (instead of half a second or less). Then after another half minute it turned back on.

But the strange thing was that it then started outputting data to the serial port (it was supposed to). It was configured for 9600 baud but it was outputting characters at the rate of about once every few seconds. When each character was output, they were output at 9600 baud because they were not garbled in my terminal that was configured to 9600.

So somehow the wrong capacitors caused the program to execute slowly but apparently didn't affect the UART's clock.

I was rather baffled by that but then found the wrong capacitors, replaced them, and it worked. I didn't investigate the odd behavior further. I also didn't check ALE so I don't know how that was behaving at the time.

Regards,
Craig Steiner