Brick a mega board with Serial.begin(0)?

So I have a program that looks up the baud rate in EEPROM to use with Serial.begin()
With a known good Mega2560 R3 board, I uploaded the aforementioned sketch.
The sketch seemed to hang afterwards for a minute or two and then proceeded to run.
Serial connection doesn't work (as expected at this point due to now known baud rate bug), but avrdude still gets a response.
Try to upload a new sketch - half way through upload it stops, never finishes.
Board is now a brick.

I've done this twice now, two separate boards now totally non-responsive, and can't even burn a new bootloader with a USBasp programmer (avrdude: no response).

With a third board I was able to modify the sketch to directly set the baud rate and then inspect the value being previously applied and discovered it was 0.
I'm not willing to try a test case with just a "Serial.begin(0);", I'm running out of boards right now!
Somehow that seems to make things really unhappy though.

No idea if this affects other processors/boards
TEST THIS AT YOUR OWN RISK!

Post the code that caused the issue. It does not help to tell people not to do what you did without knowing exactly what you did

You might also have a chance that somebody can point out a possible error in your code.

User code should not affect the upload capabilities of the board; I'm surprised about that.