well. I ended up making a boot cd to boot to dos and used a usb floppy to run the program and load roms. That seemed to clear up some issue with slow and buggy connection issues. The NT driver writer mentioned he eliminated that in his driver, but apparently the driver isn't taking well on my old laptop running xp. Not sure why, but at that point I wanted to just see if the damn thing works, so I made the boot cd and tried it.
The results of the program and communication are much better, however I had sketchy results working with my chips. I erased them and tried again while some have program errors, others will in fact program. Seems great, but when I use romident, it says it's not found. I even just read a known good chip and saved the file then romident still said it was not found as well. Not sure what is going on.
So in DOS there is no more stall on the programming and better connectivity, but some chips either have an error and wont program at all or they do but nothing checks out / verified.