.... after I went home last night and thought about it, I became less sure. When I did stuff like that it was over 5 yrs ago, maybe longer. If indicated that in an earlier post that I wasn't entirely sure (please forgive me - its been a long time). We did debug things with an external eprom but we might have had a copy of the bootcode in that eprom, too. BTW, if it does work, I wouldn't consider it a security risk because if you program the "external fetch inhibit" lock bit, it will not work. (I also haven't looked at Atmel's datasheet in about the same time). I would call it an assumption based on a memory of stuff from some time ago. I also need to keep in mind that since their's no formal documentation of this, its possible that it might have changed from one implementation to another. But, I have some other things that I also are confident will work.