By the way, the core seems fine. Running my pololu programmer from the ide is giving me a content mismatch but i bet that's my fingers.
crossloading it thru avr studio and my dragon works fine.
see, the bootloader would be a blessing today!
There's actually something worth thinking about there: with our own bootloader we know exactly who's doing what. with an arbitrary icsp programming set up there's more variation at the user end and maybe more bits to get wrong.