To cut a long story short, while building my HxC into a vintage PC case I have managed to short pins 15 and 16 on the LCD header together (due to a dodgy LCD extension cable) . This had the effect of making the backlight no longer work, even if I plug the LCD module directly into the HxC. I have tested the backlight on the LCD module by applying 5v directly to pins 15 and 16 and it works fine, so it isn't the £2 LCD module at fault

I think I've probably blown something on the PIC by shorting the LED backlight output, but the strange thing is that everything else seems to work fine, it reads/boots OK and the actual data is displayed on the LCD, just a bit hard to read with no backlight.
So my question is what is the best/cheapest way to fix it? Can I just replace the socketed PIC and re-flash the firmware or is their some bootstrap type code in the PIC which is written by Lotharek? Do you think the HxC will still work reliably if I have indeed damaged part of it? If so I may just wire up the backlight to be on all the time rather than buy a whole new unit.
TIA
Riddley