Hi Ryan,

If you do a tiny bit of searching on the web you will find LOTS of information about your PC's parallel port. You could even visit www.howstuffworks.com

I don't know anything about your programmer, but I would expect it to have its own uC. Is it programmed??

The next thing to check are the uC chips by Philips, Cynal, etc. that are ISP and don't require a homebrew programmer...so you won't have to worry whether it's the chip, the programmer or the program that's at fault when your project doesn't work.

Dennis