Flakey ZipChip 8000

[Steven Hirsch <snhirsch@gmail.com>]

I have an 8Mhz. ZipChip that's been out of service for a while due to general 
silliness and I decided to give it another shot today.  This is one of the 
units with cheap, thin tin-plate pins that bend if you look at them too hard. 
 After a heart-stopping experience bending two of them on the way into the 
motherboard, I decided to put it more or less permanently into a socket of its 
own for protection.

About 15 minutes of aggravation, I realized that no amount of care in the 
world was going to get all 40 leads into a machine-pin socket :-(.  I finally 
was able to seat it into a conventional tin-contact socket and plug that into 
the motherboard.

The problem is that this thing won't start unless I press lightly with my 
thumb on the front right corner.  At that point, it comes up and runs more or 
less reliably (although it does not reset from OA-Ctrl-Reset, I have to power 
cycle with my thumb on the chip).

This thing may not even have one more round of insertion left before pins 
start breaking off, so I'm looking for advice on solving the intermittant 
problem and mounting it permanently in... something.  What have folks done 
with these things to get around contact problems?  Is there life after broken 
pins?

I can almost imagine a circuit board with a pair of 20-pin headers and 40 
holes offset a bit so I can solder the ZipChip on permanently.