Hi ninja,

welcome to the Forum!

This may not really answer your question, but

I started about the same way with PICs
One of my first programmers was WILLEM
as I thought is is kind of universal.

Pretty soon I had to realize there are sseveral bugs (in Hard & Software) and many newer PICs are not supported.

Another attempt was a PICSTART+ clone.
Results were better, but still not perfect.
(Still PIC types that are not supported)

Today I'm using Microchip's ICD2 and I have never experienced any problems since.
With MPLAB it is just perfect.

If I would have purchased the ICD2 in the first place I would have saved a lot of money.