AVR-Chat

James,

> I'm just looking for the "net wisdom" as to whether this is an acceptable
practice.

Yeah, I do it all the time, looks kinda cool during programming too.
One peice of advice, include a short delay after power up, but before you
setup the IO pins.
in CV-AVr I do something like this ;-

void main(void)
{
delay_ms(200);
setup_io();
// rest of my code goes here.

This ensures that I'm not making the IO pins go high or low whilst the
programmer is jiggling the Reset line.
you could use a shorter delay, but I'm just paranoid.

Paul