I used the ATISP simple programmer to program Atmel AT89S8252 and AT89S53 chips in circuit and it worked under windowsXP pro
with the following settings for ponyprog2000 :
I/O port setup : Parallel
programmer : Avr ISP I/O
polarity of ctrl lines : do not invert anything.
And of course you need to apply external 5VDC to the atmel chip for the programmer to work.
Regards
Mahmood