GPIO Pin Problems

One last update for the night. Using bidirectional ports assigned to the GPIO pins with the rest of the unused pins being assigned bidirectional and grounded, I was finally able to get both input and output together without the programming failure. For some reason though, the input is still acting strangely. It's as though a fictitious source is there supplying constant voltage to the input pin and it only detects when it's shorted out. That's not going to work for the project because I need to be able to detect an active high signal. I'm not sure why it's behaving this way, hopefully someone will be able to enlightening me or tell me if the way I'm approaching this is way off base. Thank for all the help received tonight.