My solution was to hold pin 4(on my 16F648A) from receiving power until right before I try to erase the chip. Once erased it works just fine as normal until I program it again.Nigel Goodwin said:PIC's are incredibly sturdy devices, it's VERY rare to either get a duff one, or damage one.
Far more likely is that you've set the internal oscillator (as all my 16F628 tutorials do), and your programmer is unable to cope with that - as some poor programmers can't do so.
__config 0x3D18 ;sets the configuration settings (oscillator type etc.)