Hi Christopher! I also faced similar problems about 2 or 3 weeks back. First it turned out that I forgot to pull-up EA. Things started working fine, but then again....everythng screwed up and I had to reset the system several times before things worked correctly.

I am using 24MHz crystal with 30pF capacitors for clock (XTAL1 & 2) and for reset, a 10uF cap with 8.2K / 10K resistor.

Since I had made my circuit on a small vero-board, my crystal was dry-soldered. Fixing that solved my problem.

My reset resistor /capacitor (though ensuring that reset pin was high for 2 m/c cycles) combination didnot work so well either. So I moved to the above values.

The strange thing was that half of my port would reset and half would not. For e.g. the Tx/Rx pins would not reset to the value 1'b1 each while my timer would work fine (with the help of an LED on another port pin).

Regards
Aman