[jimfortytwo]

This is probably not your issue, but our team was chasing ghosts until we realized our print statements were actually the problem. Hyperterminal wasn't clearning the screen between updates, but rather just writting lines on top of eachother. The result was that any time an unusually long message or long number was displayed, it would linger to the outside of the 'real' readout and look like a giant integer from that point afterwards.