Well I have been working for a while on the sponsored ( beta testing) board given to me by Teachers and Seniors.Its called a DOPEDUINO(Doped Arduino).Its an indian clone of Arduino duemolive with an onboard Atmega168 preburnt with arduino bootloader. I`ll soon be posting great step by step tutorials on how to get started with it. Arduino–Is an opesource hardware prototyping platform that allows you to do what is called “Physical Computing”.You interact with the outside world thru sensors and process the input and produce an output.
However using an Arduino u can satisfy the DIY Guy in you but you dont get to learn much about the internal working of the chips and all as the bootloader makes it easier for you by hiding things.But still its better than those AVR`s/8051 we used at our college projects in Line followers,Edge detectors etc which would often fail,dont burn,give an unexpected error at the time of competition.
I have faced it all..Although i could just blink things on 8051 architecture.But could do a lot more on an AVR ( Thanks to CodeVision AVR)..i tried and tried but couldn`t get my Atmega 16l to read the 5v and out of frustration ( i was the one responsible for all the electronics part in my gp) i literally broke one chip..( they are quite expensive)..
Then i thought may be Arduino would be better….
The link for Dopeduino is
http://learnmicros.com/Joomla/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=11&Itemid=22
keep reading….
Indian Tinker 
I jControlWare GUI (great idea !!!).
I am having problems with the com port connection, it will not connect to any com port.
Hi ! Do u have .net framework installed? And drivers? Try doing a sudo/admin ?