Thanks again for your help, Bill.
Of course, now that you point that out, I see the note on page 51 of the datasheet...
On a Power-on Reset, the pins PORTA<4:0> are configured as analog inputs and read as "0".
I feel like an idiot that it was that simple and I didn't see it -- well, I guess that is the course of learning. I am glad to see that I do have an understanding on pull-up resistors, etc., that I simply had the ports set as analog, rather than digital (well, there's a subject for me to do some research on!). I knew I was overlooking something!
eng1 --> That was a "last effort" before I actually asked the question here. I like to try my best to figure things out on my own (they stick more that way!), but was simply getting nowhere -- as a last try I tried to see if I could manually set the port high (I was thinking, OK, let's see if I have to tell it to be high to start with) -- I didn't think it would work, but I was desperate at that time!
I actually have a small program written to pull the serial number from an iButton (the code above was simply a test to try and figure out why the pin remained low) -- but I could not get it to loop and wait for the touch of the iButton (was testing with btfsc -- as long as it's high (1) it should loop, but it wouldn't because it sat low (0) due to being configured as an analog input).
I've done a quick test just now by adding clrf ANSEL and the pin does indeed show high, so I am going back to play with the iButton code, which shouldn't be a problem to get going now!
Thanks for your comments!