Lefty, that terminal program is great. Does it do ANSI emulation too? I will try it but maybe you know... Once neat thing that I tried was cycling the RTS to cause a reset without having to close and reopen the port. I wonder if a macro button could be set to do that...
One idea is that the IDE could create a virtual serial port and open and close it as needed for the load process. Then you could connect any terminal application to the virtual port and give the IDE plenty of control to make it work well.