Strange!

I asked an associate who is familiar with C51 to cut&paste David's code. It behaved exactly as David described.

We added the statement to clear SM2, and things started working "normally" (c assumed hex value of keystrokes entered via serial window).

Now, repeating with original code, we can't duplicate original problem! c continues to assume value of keystrokes.

This has to be a debugger quirk!

-Ron