With all these replies, seems I should have a working programmer by now. I don't. I've gone over these replies and have looked at Atmels programmers and software and studied the schematics to see which one I could build.
Atmels 4052 ISP programmer: been working on it for the last 3 days. It's wired, gone through it 100 times, can't get it to work.
I can only program the 89S52 currently. I have a china ebay stk500 and it will program an .obj or .hex file into an 89S52 using AVR studio4. So I programmed the firmware into it, 5K firmware, into 8K flash, wired up the circuit tried to use this in place of the AT89LP4052. It doesn't work. That's expected as the AT89LP4052 is single cycle.

Atmels 89LP studio developer: If I could afford to buy even parts for this complicated mess, I could probably afford to buy a working board. I can't. Software seems to only support that board.

Atmels 'other' serial port ISP software. This has the ver 3.3 upgrade which includes the AT89LP52. The 3.3 upgrade fails on both computers of mine, same error message, Fail something. It does list the 89S52 without that upgrade. My serial ISP board with the 89S52 instead of the 40lp52 of course doesn't work with this either.

The parallel port for the Atmels ISP software. Well I spent a long time looking for this. And I spent a lot of time looking for any parallel port programmer for any Atmel software. I couldn't find this either.

So thanks everybody for your time and help. I sincerely appreciate the thought put into these replies. Truth is, I'm just can't buy a commercial programmer, least not now.
Thanks again,
Rick