This won't really help thingtodo's problems;
I have the same talent for hooking stuff up backwards. For that reason I'm pretty paranoid about making this nearly impossible by design.
I was looking at my old MPLAB ICD2, and they used a cat5 cable between the demo board and the debugger. For all the different little programs I've written for that demo-board I never managed to hook that up backwards - LOL!
Perhaps it would be possible to make some mod for the new control boards for a keyed programmer connection?
Good Luck, thingstodo! You are really helping us all out by posting this.
I truly appreciate it.
- e*clipse