Thanks Bill, I suspect you may have saved me mucho hair pulling and aggravation.
I thought the deal with lock bits once they were programmed was that the only way to unprogram them is via a chip erase?
Also, I seem to remember reading in either the AVR or avrdude documentation that changed fuse settings didn't operate until the next reset of the chip. So if you are interactive mode with avrude, for example, you can write various values to the fuse bytes (and I would assume lock bits???) but none of it will prevent or enable you doing anything different until the Atmel part is reset. Or am I misremembering?
Anyway, thanks for the heads-up with all of this, at least I know where to start when things don't work out of the box.
Speaking of box, your case looks cool! Probably help prolong the life of the Dragon, too -- I've read they are not very robust and can fail if certain chips are touched while operating. 