fungus:
and a 4.7k pullup resistor on RESET.
The internal pullup by itself isn't reliable? Surprising.
Thanks for the links! Useful reference material there.
BTW, just for some context, the discussion regarding the internal clock accuracy is interesting and useful for the general situation, but in this particular application I won't be using serial comms at all. Actually, I'll be using the atMega8L to replace an atTiny85, which works fine with an internal oscillator at 8MHz for this application, so I had assumed the atMega8L would too.
In this situation, since I'm not using ADC, or anything requiring a high clock accuracy, I was just wondering what external components (if any) I must/would be advised to have for an atMega8L.