16F876A dead after x programming cycles

Yesterday my first PIC died!

It was a 16F187A on one of my development boards.

It had been reprogrammed (using the MicroCode Loader) many many many times.

The problems started with the Loader not being able to access the PIC.
So I took the PIC off the board, plugged it onto the programmer, reprogrammed it with the loader code.

This worked fine for a few runs, then again I had to reprogram the loader.

Yesterday MPLAB told me "Programming ERROR"
I guess this was the end of the life of this brave PIC.

@Steve,
we talked about the problem of Loader Code being corrupted.
Obviously it was not a problem of the Loader, it was the PIC.

let's have a minute of silence to bye to this poor PIC who left us after many many many good hours service.

As now, i never get this problem. When i finish a project, i change the PIC and keep a copy of the finish PCB with the PIC used to develop it.

Only a few time i get that kind of problem. As i suspect, it was caused by floating unused pin and/or circuit modification when power is on... not a good practice :)