haha, you got that right. well, I just tried using a different external power source (the first time was a usb connection, and I read about the grounding issues, so I used an ac adapter) and winpic800 picked it up, wrote, and verified the chip successfully. However, when I tried to verify it after programming, it failed reading all 0's, so I'm hoping it wrote and maybe there's some sort of read-lock on it or something, I'll hook up the circuit later today to test.