AVR-Chat

You do need to assure that the fuses are set for your application.
If you're not using the 1 MHz internal RC, you'll need to set fuses,
at least the clock oscillator and CKOPT fuses if applicable to your
chip.

You might find an app that I wrote a while back interesting.
It's in the files section, called "fuser".
This app simply uses a small AVR to set the fuses on another AVR.

How did you figure on handling programming the devices anyway?  Most
any chip programmer can set the fuses in less than a second.