Xbee Issues/ Arduino

I’ve been playing around with the XBees for several days now and they seem extremely flaky. I have 2 wire, 1 pro and one chip Xbee and the sparkfun xbee dongle, sparkfun xbee breakouts and a couple parallax usb xbee boards and they all seem to do the same thing.

My setup consists of 2 breadboards, one with a Uno and and wire xbee with a program sending a small text string every 1-2 seconds and a second breadboard with a NANO + Xbee receiving the text. (The text is then spoken by a Emic 2 for fun).

MY problem is when I disconnect something say the usb power cord for the sending breadboard, it doesn’t always work when I plug it back in. Even XCTU won’t recognize it. I’ll screw around for an hour unplugging everything, rebooting machines and then it will work again. Once it’s working I’ll unplug it and plug it into somewhere else and it stops working. It still won’t work it I plug it back into the spot it was working.

Are there any guidelines or instructions on how to develop on these things for them to keep working? If I unplug the USB cord and move it to somewhere else shouldn’t it still work afterwards? This is quite frustrating because every time I unplug one of the two to improve my program on the second nothing works after.

After a couple more hours of playing around last night it appears that prior to powering up the Arduinos via USB I must first disconnect the RX and TX lines. If I power on with them disconnected and then reconnect them afterwards everything works. I knew that I needed to disconnect the RX to upload my code but not prior to powering it on. Can someone confirm this?