Your predicament ( what is wrong ? - programmer? MCU? Code? ) and the resulting frustration is quite understandable. Particularly with a student budget, the options to use top of the line products and have a dozen MCUs to swap and check are all not possible. If I am sounding quite pessimistic - it is because I have been through all of this and know what it means. So what, give up ? NEVER. BY NO MEANS.

I can offer a simple solution that will atleast point the right way in case of a quandary like this: which is wrong?

Have a simple master PCB and one master code - both of which have been thoroughly checked out. And you can write the master code keeping it as simple as possible. All that is needed is to toggle port bits in a round robin manner with sufficient delay in between each toggle so that if you want to probe the pins - you can do it. Anyway in this you are the best judge - maybe you work with serial ports often and would like to include a simple "Hello World" code and see the result on a terminal program.

I have seen that this simple code has helped pick out many hardware issues. I am not sure if this is a professional way or anything like that - but works well for me.

I am not sure how the Frontline programmer ( from Salem?)is designed and configured. Before I came into the flash MCUs, I used a serial port programmer from Logic Power in Pune. Quite good and I have had no problems for many years through WIN95, WIN98 and WIN-XP. Not sure if that company is still there - send a mail to logicpwr@vsnl.com to check out. The model I used was SPP_1.03W and it can program a whole lot Atmel,Philips,WinBond MCUs.

These (mostly)40 legged fellows are smart but lazy bums and will try every trick to evade working. Let them not win !

Good Luck

Raghu