I saw the schematic for the parallel programmer. Is that all that's needed, or is there more circuitry on the Arduino related to programming? If that's all that's needed for programming AVR chips, I don't think I'll even need a kit. I saw similar plans for a serial programmer with just a few zener diodes (even better, I wonder if I even have a parallel port on my new machine?).
But anyway, I'll be playing with the Arduino for a while first. I think I can live with the rather small bootloader program on there.