I was tring to void any influence of running a led in series with a resistor(current limiting) straight to the pin. So In other words, I was tring to buffer the leds.

I was desperate. Everything I was tring failed. I had an LCD display, serial port and other circuitry wired to the chip and it all worked. Then suddenly nothing worked.

The suggestion Oleg Sergeev solved everything, I ran EA to vcc and it works. Funny I never did this before and i haven't had problems.

Thansk for the reply.