I borrowed a JMD programmer from a friend to try to erase these PICs but no luck. After doing the erase procedure and also trying programming a working program neither worked. If I apply power to the PICs after all of that I see that they still have the program on them that stuffed them up.

Is it just me, or does it seem like bad design on behalf of microchip if disabling MCLR and setting Timer 1 to external clock will create a program that cannot be erased from the PIC?