I would do that if I could understand how to get the errors from the CMD window into something I could post.
Do like what nILS said; or even better, enable quickedit mode - that’ll allow you to highlight with the mouse and hit enter to copy, and right-click to paste. Google is your friend on that one 
I have tried every way I can find on the forum to set the environment variables but they just do not seem to stick.
There are only two ways (kinda): Temporarily, in the CMD.exe window. If you do them there, they will be lost when you close the window. That’s done using the DOS command ‘SET’, as in:
SET MIOS_PATH=C:\MIOS\_SVNMIOS\trunk
SET MIOS_BIN_PATH=C:\MIOS\_SVNMIOS\trunk\bin
The other way, is in the GUI, which is explained in depth in http://www.midibox.org/dokuwiki/windows_toolchain_core
(You can also download tools to do it other ways, but we’ll leave it there for now.
Also, when I look into c:\miod_base_v1_0b\bin I do not see the files cmios.h and pic18fregs.h which are the main ones that are complained about.
They should not be in that path, so that’s good.
I guess I do not know what I do not know???
HEhehe
I’ll try to help!
I did go through your troubleshooting guide. There is so many pages on the ucapps site and Forum that I am lost in the trees. I cannot see what is important and what is out of date.
Sorry about that mate, but that’s how it is. You will need to take a little more time to read. I know it’s exciting ad you just want to get started…
I see where it said that sdcc_skeleton is a first step test to see if your system is correctly setup to compile using SDCC.
Where did you see that? That may be bad advice.
The skeleton requires some more configuraton of your system, than an already-written app. This is because the ‘distribution packages’ that the apps are in when you download the zip, have the MIOS_PATH and MIOS_BIN_PATH hard-coded to point to the files inside the zip.
If you use the base package, which should only be required if you are building a new application from scratch, then you need to set these environment vars yourself.
SDCC -version displays the correct response as shown on the forum.
Good 
I followed the guide on setting the environmental variables. But when I type PATH in the CMD window, the response does not reflect the changes.
PATH is not the only environment var you need to set. Anyway, if you can paste the output here, that’ll make it much easier to solve.
Also, when I type make -version in CMD window I get GNU Make 3.81
Is this what I should be seeing?
It is indeed 
When I type make main.c in CMD I get so many errors I cannot begin to display them???
Often, the top one is the only one that should interest you, the rest may be consequential to that.
Is there a newbi guide that walks one through a simple compile?
Yes, it goes like this:
make
Hehehe seriously though, that’s it. You just have to setup the toolchain correctly first.
I ran the test on the SDCC’s how to and all the examples worked as they described them so I think I have SDCC setup correctly.
Good man.
Just the include *.h files are not being found at compile time. I understand that the environmental variables should tell the compiler where the *.h files are but, like I said, when I search the \bin I do not see the missing *.h files that the compiler reports as not found.
As I mentioned, that’s not where they should be. The will be in several sub-folders of MIOS_PATH. If you specify MIOS_PATH correctly, it’ll find them all.
I then copied the *.h files into the \bin but the compiler still faults that they are not found.
Never edit MIOS files. If it seems that you need to, something has gone wrong, and it’s time to post 
Ahh, a new post…
PATH=C:\MSYS\1.0\bin;C:\MinGW\bin;C:\Program Files\gputils\bin;C:\Program Files\
SDCC\bin; C:\MSUS\1.0\bin ;
You didn’t copy/paste. Always copy/paste. Don’t read/type. Also, I can see that you’ve run the command a few times. Should only need to run it once. There are lots of repeated entries in ther, that’s bad, and I notice you’ve added these two:
c:\Program Files\SDCC\include\pic16;c:\Documents and Settings\Bill\Desktop\mios_base_v1_0b\include\c
They shouldn’t be there. Just follow the docs exactly, and It *should* work.
I say *should*, because you have reported a rare error. The cygwin one…
A quick google around will show you that the short answer is that you’ve installed tools that are not compatible with one another. Antivirus, firewalls, windows vista, anything using all your ram, cygwin, other posix tools, all manner of software can cause this error.
This has only occurred to two other midiboxers, and they ended up using the posix_bin.zip because they could not find out what was broken on their system. For one of them it worked. I’ll have to leave it up to you…