Thanks for the info. I'll look into doing that. it would be nice to be able to program it with everything attached if necessary. But as far as the basic idea of using the parts on on a larger board and programming it as an arduino, there's no problem with that correct? I guess I'm not super clear on the interface between the bootloader and the hardware. I thought the bootloader is only on the chip so as long as all the external parts (clock etc) that it needs to reference are there, it shouldn't care if there are other parts attached. As long as they don't interfere with the programming itself. I should have enough pins to leave the tx rx pins empty if I can use other pins for the serial lcd.
Thanks!