Here are some things to think about. This is not so much black and white as shades of gray.
If you had the $15 serial programmer you could use it to program the bootloader into a 16F877A and build a ICD2 clone.
An ICD2 of some sort should be your end goal. It is a great programmer.
The sparkfun $15 programmer has the advantage that is is built and
should work out of the box. I have one and it did. But given that your computer is questionable you may have problems. At least you would know it was not the hardware. Would work better on a 10 year old Win89 machine (clean install). If you try you should be able to find one for free.
Given that you are new to this (and a few of your other posts) there is a good chance you will have problems regardless of what programmer you choose. Better to start with know good hardware.
The
Parallel Programmer with ICSP is a better unit then the
Serial Port Programmer - Socketed. None of the serial port problems. That puts you within $10 of an inchworm kit, But then we are back to not knowing if the hardware is working.
You could go back and get that very simple low voltage programming cable working. Then build an ICD2.
If you want to skip right to a modern programmer get an inchworm or inchworm+ kit. When it comes to ICD2's I like the kit or DIY route. They tend to die from time to time and you stand a better chance of repairing a kit or DIY unit.
I hope that helped.
I think I said this earlier. Start learning assembler with MPLAB and the simulator that comes with it. Once you tackle that looking at a programmer makes more sense !