AVR-Chat

> Are there public domain or free IBM PC type programs to do an 
> ICP for AVR?  I mean I'm sure there is.  What are the best ones?

Two good ICSP Programmer Utilities. Both can use a simple 3 or 4
resistor programmer connected to the PC Parallel port.

PonyProg http://www.lancos.com/prog.html

AVRDude  http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/avrdude

A good bootloader is MegaLoad that you connect to the hardware UART on
the AVR and interface to a PC's serial port.

Alex