Greetings, Cemetech. It's been a while!

I'm having a problem with the atmega328p-au on a custom circuit I designed. Everything will be working just fine, I can program the chip, it does its job interacting with everything on the board, but then I'll program it and all of a sudden the chip is bricked. bricked to the point where upon trying to program it again it doesn't let me because the device signature is supposedly 0x000000. Thinking it could be a problem with the board, I desoldered it, moved it to a different board I know for a fact works, and then the device signature becomes 0xffffff.

The only peculiar thing that I think could be linked to this problem is that sometimes I'll compile the code and it doesn't work, but then I'll change absolutely nothing, hit compile again and then it'll work. The amount of times I have to hit compile varies, but needless to say that is unusual. The libraries I'm using are the adafruit radiohead library, and a library for communicating with gamecube controllers (if it isn't clear by this, I'm trying to make a radio remote control.) The times that it doesn't compile, it says there's a segmentation fault that occurred in the "Nintendo.h" library for interfacing with gamecube controllers. I'm not sure what this could mean, but like I said, I can just hit compile again and then sometimes it'll just work.

The 2 times, now, that I've apparently bricked one of these chips, it seems to program (I'm using arduino as isp) all the way through, then start verifying which it will ultimately fail (this I'm not 100% sure about, but I am pretty sure it's when it fails the verification.)

Is it possible that the "Nintendo.h" library could be bricking my controllers? or is there another explanation here? It's not a problem with my code since it does sometimes compile just fine. I'm very confused by this and would very much appreciate any help I can get. Thank you!
I've had a similar problem with some atmega's where they would freak out randomly when connecting them for programming.

I ended up having the solder a button between GND & RESET on the board and then what I would do is hit the button and then 1-2 seconds later hit upload and it would work. It took a little while to get the timing down but it worked. Not sure if this might help with you as well?
Make sure you have a suitable capacitor on the vcc and gnd lines. Programming can draw quite a bit of current and sometimes the chip just bugs out.
  
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