Well, I built myself a little programmer and tried it out with avrdude
and some ATtiny2313s under Linux and Windows. Avrdude 5.0 seemed to
like it at first. It recognized the chip and I (apparently)
sucessfully loaded my program kbm06.hex. But when I tried to
manipulate the fuse bits I got error messages and the chip got fried.
By the time I stopped experimenting, I had fried 3 tinys. Things
seemed to work OK though on an old AT90S2313 with no programmable fuse
bits.

Damn. Since my programmer is the simplest possible, direct-wired one
that cuts every corner and is on a long cable to boot, my first guess
is that the chips were the victims of rotten, noisy waveforms.
Unfortunately the programmer uses the parallel port where my PC-based
oscilloscope connects so I can't just look and see.

What to do. I think that rather than chase this down I'll invest some
more of my dear wife's retirement money and buy a genuine Atmel
programmer. That will take a lot of variables out of the equation, so
to speak. So Part III will start there.

This is doubly annoying because I was carefully writing up a
step-by-step "how to", which now must at least temporarily remain a
"not like this."