fwiw, I haven't killed an ATmega yet, despite quite a bit of ArduinoISP programming of bootloaders and such...
Have you spent enough on your cheap programming setup to think maybe you should have bought one of the $10 USBASP programmers, or a $20 USBtinyISP yet? I mean, I'm as frugal as frugal can be, but the price of "real" programmers has been going down, while the difficulties in using a parallel port have been getting worse...