as mentioned in op and youve suggested again the programmer does not matter. its the same with "arduino as avrisp", real avrisp mkII, parallel port with giveio, ponyprog, usbasp, etc. i tried them all. sd card is not an option. contacts, not to mention my fingers, would surely wear out during the thousands of downloads it takes to debug exotic boot code (no exaggeration). its also unlikely any other utility could replace avrdude considering the feature set, many of which are not optional for my applications. i simply need to make the load high time for that 3 word test program as quick as loading the same one low. ie skip ff bytes instead of doing whatever it is doing with them now.
i think, bill, you are closer to the solution. unfortunately resources are not available to consider re-compiling avrdude even if i was competent enough to understand someone elses source. if i were set up to do windows programming i might be able to throw together my own version like i did for real mode os but thats not practical in this case either.
verbose mode reveals little. erase takes no time at all and the "writing flash" progress bar simply crawls along when loading that file. avrdude is known to be a flaky buggy oddball kludge but unfortunately the closest thing to a standard and apparently nothing better is available. guess ill just have to continue limping along watching that damn program take forever to do absolutely nothing. anyway thanks for the suggestions guys and i do appreciate the replies.