> A few months ago I attended a seminar that provided me a Explorer 16
> Development board, thinking that it'll give me a good starting point.
> I joined the PICList shortly after that and have been lurking since
> then, Well, I'm finally able to start learning what I'm doing, and I
> found out that it is not possible to program it without the ICD 2.  Is
> this correct, or am I missing something?
you are missing something, the explorer 16 comes with a bootloader on the
4550 this can be used to set up the 4550 to operate as a pickit2. look in
appendix B of the manual for details.

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