All those designs violate the required programming specification or rely on the current from the serial port being sufficient to power and program the PIC. To be honest, my advice is not to use a serial programmer at all, they are always unreliable and may work on one computer but not another. For the time and expense you have already spent, you could have bought a Pickit2 clone which would reliably program not only the 16F84A but almost every other kind of PIC and memory as well.
Brian.