what i tried is out of curiosity to decouple a 78L05 with 1uF polyester capacitor from the middle pin of the regulator to the (+) and the PIC said goodbye! i can see the code inside it but i can't run my PIC or program it again.
the problem is that i don't understand what i did!! must something with the capacitive reactance? or MCLR 10K resistor touched the one end of the capacitor and something happend?
If the PIC oscillator is running, then you can't enter programming mode - so this means some programmers can't access a PIC once you've set the internal oscillator, particularly if you set MLCR as an I/O pin.
Nigel it is possible the PIC still works? if yes why the program inside it doesn't run anymore?
I've thrown out a perfectly good 16F88 once because I programmed a hex file for a differnt PIC into it (It overwrote the config bits)
Turns as other users here found you could fool the programmer by connecting a good 16F88 and then dropping in the screwy 16F88 and erasing.
But as Nigel said, tough little beasties. I've even seen super hot PICs recover (+ & - reversed) still function.