As I mentioned earlier this week, I recently “lost” an
ATmega168 due to flashing the configuration fuses to disable the RESET pin, without realizing that this makes the device
impossible to reflash with SPI. This is particularly frustrating because the device is still 100% functional, just completely deaf to ordinary serial programmers. The only way to recover the device is using what Atmel calls “High Voltage Parallel Programming Mode” which very few programmers support, most importantly, not the
USBtinyISP I otherwise love.