Ok if its just to power the atiny then its not much use for anything other than the bin, still it was only 99p, I'll meter the connections to the socket from the usb connector, I think your latter idea of the programmer expecting an atiny with a bootloader burned in is probably what I have, I did get 2 atinys from the same seller, they didnt say if the bootloader is pre loaded or not, my pc comes up with unknown usb device whether an atiny is fitted or not, I dont have any issues using an uno to pre load the bootloader to be able to use one of these.
Yes I burned the atmega chip with the component tester hex file, but nada, I still need to do some investigation the lcd could be dead too, so far I've only checked to see if theres 5v, there is.