MSP430 basics - pulling hair out!!!

We are working on a small MSP430F149 project and are having a heap of grief
getting the basic hardware going.

We continually get inconsistent results when attempting to connect and
download to the msp430. Initially the JTAG will not connect but this problem
appeared
to rectify itself. It then had trouble writing to memory at address 0x1100 -
the start of the program flash. Reseating the msp430 in the ZIF socket
seemed to fix this problem. We initially tried restarting the debug proxy
and the debugger and cygwin without success.

We finally managed to download to the device about 3 times. When the code
ran it always stopped at the reset vector. We though it may be some problem
with the RTOS and the timers. The watchdog is switched off.

We then tried one of the examples supplied with mspgcc LED flashing code. We
built the code without any problems but when we attempted to download the
memory write error reappeared. We tried re-seating the micro in the ZIF
socket etc without success.

We are using the a homebrew JTAG programmer and a TI development board
pwered by 2 x D cells and driving this via the mspgcc-20041112.exe software.

So many questions!!
Where do we start debugging the system?
Could the problem be timing related? Is the PC we are using too slow/fast?
How can we check if everything is okay with the software setup/hardware
setup?

Any suggestions would be most appreciated.

Thanks
rob













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