MELabs makes the LAB-X series of boards and the Epic programmers themselves, and they gave me excellent customer service with mine (almost 10 yrs ago). When I thought I had a hardware issue, I called them, and within a minute or two I was up and running with a simple pebkam fix. I would definitely recommend them. Buy it from rentron.com and you'll be supporting a great contributor to the forum, as well as get yourself a second great resource. He offers discount bundles. (At least, he used to.)

MikroE boards are huge and lower priced, if that's what you want.