Thanks Randy, Peter, Steve..

I too have usually worked with just a scope & test code..and generally quite successfully.
My last project tho' had some real problems..essentially hardware, not so much code. eg. Subtle timing problems causing intermittent reads of garbage data etc.... I mean a single failure in, say, 5 days continuous running.
Wasn't 'till I relented - spent the bucks on an ICE - trapped the failure, read the trace & located the problem on the first time it failed. It was worth the bucks just to finally nail that one.
This design had a lot of external stuff..Real Time Calendar, Watchdog, A/D converter, UART, EEprom, Spread Spectrum radio, SMPS, PLDs', 32 pages of bank switched RAM etc..lots of potential for hardware incompatabilities.
Given the highly integrated nature of the ADuC812, I guess it's unlikely I'll see again the sort of problems I've had.
So, I take your points..maybe I'm not going to need the 'big guns'
Allan