I am new to this list so this may be an old problem. If so, forgive the
waste of bandwith but I don't know what to do.

My problem is that my recently aquired Picstart Plus hates the 16C54.
I have tried it with several PICs, but it fails (fryes) the '54. I
installed 5 never used (new) '54s and sometimes it would tell me that
they were not blank, other times communication with the programmer was
lost, other times it will read the PICs OK, etc. Then I tried this '54s
in a different programmer (from Parallax) and they were all bad.
So I thought, well, maybe they were bad from the beginning. Then I read
a working '54 previously programmed in the Parallax programmer, and it
read OK, so I erased it and reprogrammed it in the Picstart and
everything worked fine. I reprogrammed this PIC about 4 or 5 times until
it also went suddenly bad.
So the question is: is my programmer bad? or what the heck happened?
I've also tried some '55, '65, '84, '58 and '509 PICs and none has given
me any problems, only the '54.
My programmer has software version 1.20, and I am using the latest
version of MPLAB.
Please any help will be greatly appreciated.

Desperate PICer,

Gabriel Gonzalez
gabrielg74@hotmail.com

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