Following up on an idea I got from this list, I fabricated a handy-dandy
ZIF socket adapter to use on most of my PIC protoboards.

I used a Dremel tool and ground the rectangular cross-section pins on
the 18-pin ZIF socket to a more tapered shape. It just took a small
amount of reshaping so that the pins would fit snuggly into a regular
machined pin IC socket.

After I had the ZIF socket evenly "plugged in" to the machined pin
socket, I gave it a few extra taps to lodge the assembly tighly
together.

The new "piggy-back" set of sockets (ZIF on top) fits into the regular
socket of most protoboards. You can then easily and safely swap newly
programmed PICs into the circuit until the code is finalized.

The exception is that the ZIF assembly won't quite fit the common 18-pin
protoboards (ITU I believe) if they are fitted with a crytal and a
largish electrolytic capacitor on the 5v power supply. It's OK if you
use a ceramic resonator and/or a tantalum capacitor. You might sqeeze
things in if you tried. However, it all fits fine on my protoboard from
Phil Whitmarsh in the UK and my homebrew protoboards.

BTW, the Whitmarsh protoboards are great but not available outside the
UK. They have room for CPU, 5v supply, switches and LEDs for all I/O
lines and a scratch area for a few extra components. The bare boards
cost about $8 US and the kit with all parts is around $18 US.

If anybody's interested, maybe we can convince Phil to ship some to the
States.

Another neat discovery is the small crimp-on connectors from Jameco.
They crimp easily onto small guage hookup wire and fit snuggly over
.025" header pins.

I'm putting together a sort of PIC LAB consisting of a CPU board, an
accessory board with ULN2803, ADC0831, MAX233, and 8 ohm speaker, and a
solderless breadboard. All of the ICs are terminated with header pins so
I can easily patch-cord assemblies together for testing.

The Jameco pins are part number 100765 and cost about .06 each for
quantity 100. Buy a bunch, they're handy.

Jim