Hi, Lets say i have the Duemilanove here and would like to purchase a bareboneboard. as far as i can see there is no USB jack there soldered in the first place.. so.. could i write and upload the sketch with my duomilanove attached and swap the chips then? Or is there some fundamental error with this idea rendering this useless?
It is fine to program the chip in one device and swap it into another. I have done this many times. It just makes the development cycle longer and can put strain on the chip pins with constant plugging and unplugging. You might like to make some zero insertion force socket (ZIF) at both ends.
Thats what Im going to do :-
I`ve just purchased 5 chips and a ATAVRISP2 Atmel AVR Programmer.
Trying to source the ZIF socket and the xtals.
I think I can get the xtals from maplins .
ok, thanks for your answers :0)
Do generic ZIF-to-DIP adapters exist? Just plop one of those in there instead of a full-blown shield. I only saw some ridiculously expensive adapter assemblies in Digikey, but they were for ZIF-to-header or ZIF-to-PLCC.
If not, seems like a ZIF Shield might be a useful thing, but rather than draw signals from the Arduino headers, draw it directly from the DIP socket in which the ATmega168 sits.
When I think of "shield" I think of being tied to the four header rows at least for support, and the risk here is whether the DIP socket is in the same spot on each Arduino DIP revision.
It`s a replacement to the chip not a shield .
which plugs into the chip socket and then the chip plugs into that.
The one I`ve seen are like a super wide chip, so may get in the way of other components.
Stack a couple normal DIP sockets into the original DIP socket, until you have no more physical conflicts. 
Actually, I wouldn't trust the connections of this sort if trying to burn bootloaders.