My Picstart Plus (with flash upgrade board) just failed last week while
trying to program some PIC12C672 parts.

Symptoms: program hang with strange timeout message. Rebooted, tried
another part, same thing. Noticed leds on programmer dieing out.  Found
polyfuse getting hot thus removing power from rest of board.

Microchip offered *no* hassle; they sent a replacement programmer by 2 day
shipping and asked for the old one to be sent back.

After visually checking out the new versus the old board, the only
significant change I could detect was a different value for the switching
power supply inductor.  But this may have nothing to do with the failure.

The replacement unit worked fine.

If you have experienced anything like this, you might want to call the
Microchip support line and discuss it with them.

As usual, YMMV.
Tom

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