I ordered 3 atmega8a-pu for the net sum of US$6.30 including shipping from china and they have been most difficult.. How likely is it that they are fake/made by someone other than atmel or me mishandling them that has caused them to become more and more difficult? Now at the point of only one of them returning an id other than 0xffffff...
The print on them is a lot weaker than the 328p's I got today and the date says october last year (ordered at the end of january)
How likely is it that they are fake/made by someone other than atmel or me mishandling them that has caused them to become more and more difficult?
typo here please reframe the statement.
Weaker print doesn't mean that the ATmega is fake ,Please drop this notion forever because i have many ATmega including i got from original Arduino all are weak print.
I had 4 ATmega168's ,2 ATmega8 one free othe loaded with Bootloader, 3 328P's all are dull printed.
Now at the point of only one of them returning an id other than 0xffffff...
Please clarify further.
As always, if the deal is too good to be true, it probably is. I have no doubt there are counterfeit ATmegas to be found. They're pretty cheap already from authorized dealers (or well-known suppliers like SparkFun or Adafruit). Be a big shot and spend a couple bucks more for the peace of mind. 
It seems to me, in most cases like this, if you pay significantly less than the average going rate, you're probably going to end up buying them again elsewhere anyway. Don't waste your time and money.
@NI$HANT - you have several typos and I don't see any in my sentences so don't quite get where the hostile attitude comes from....
At any rate, I have now bricked the two atmega328ps I got from futurlec, which I don't suspect to be fake (and now I really don't think the cheap-o-hong-kong ones were either).. So most likely something else wrong, but I can't understand what is wrong.
Everything works correctly until they decide not to cooperate. The last one I remember quite clearly. Had done this several times already, but: I burned the fuses (all three of them), flash and lock bits. Avrdude says everything is okay and everything is verified ok. But (I was just running this several times to see if it would fail) then it suddenly reported 0xffffff..
Could it be my custom circuit board? Avrdude on mac? Tinyisp? usb2serial board? I'm really at a loss now -- everything worked and then it didn't. If I put a new chip in it works, but stops after a while..
Btw, last time I didn't touch the board or anything between working and failure so not esd.
edit: and what I have programmed on them seems to work so maybe somehow the fuses can have gotten set to disable isp? but how would that happen? I was just arrow up and enter when it didn't work anymore 
Well, if you'd like a review, give us some details..
What was your avrdude command line? What were your fuse settings?
Describe and/or take a picture of your breadboard setup. What are you using for a power supply?
or me mishandling them that has caused them to become more and more difficult?
You mishandling them has made ATmega's difficult and where i have been hostile? , DO you NOT see please in my statements?
That's good question that I would like to know as well!
avrdude -p m328p -P /dev/tty.usbserial -c arduino -b 19200 -U lfuse:w:0xff:m -U hfuse:w:0xd9:m -U efuse:w:0x07:m -U flash:w:Test.hex -U lock:w:0x3E:m
Power comes from rs232-board