I have never used serial event before, always did it sas you described. Untill I was fighting this issue I always thought SerialEvent did some magick behind the scenes (say some kind of "highlevel" inturrupt or something else I don't know about) so that it was actually called outside of normal loop() looping. Is there some inherent benifit to using it, or does it just simplify coding for new folks? I don't plan on using it any more, just adds confusion and strange flow to my cod.e