PICKit3 firmware ... MPLABX 3.40 . win7 . solved

Seems to be one of MC's unsolved issues here , I was having a few program freezes with PIC24 debug ( probably a super bug i had coded ! ) so I wondered about PK3 firmware it was 1.28.70 , ( used to be 1.34.17 but lost that ! ) MPLABX said latest should be 1.44.26 , but refused to reprogram the tool ... turned to MPLAB 8.92 it could not see the PKFW .jar file , eventually ! found and copied the PICKIT3.jar ( in MPLABX dir )changed the extention to .zip ! extracted the FW files, moved all these to one directory, opened MPLAB 8.92 , and did a manual reprogram of the PK3 from this directory ... success. Thought I would share ..

Just been using mine, and the output window shows:

Connecting to MPLAB PICkit 3...

Currently loaded firmware on PICkit 3
Firmware Suite Version.....01.44.26
Firmware type..............dsPIC33F/24F/24H

Target voltage detected
Target device PIC24FJ64GA002 found.
Device ID Revision = 3046

Device Erased...

Programming...

Click to expand...

A search of the MC forum posts suggest MPLABX in certain circumstances will not update the PK3 firmware , it would not on my two PC's although a clean build ( no previous versions ) apparently will think it also depends on PK3 version currently installed , until above fix all i could do is turn the versions backwards !
1.44.26 I believe is latest