My hardware issues remain unresolved. Apparently, HP has decided that my two month old laptop with the cracked display is not covered under warranty. Of course, since I have a wide variety of accessories compatible with this machine, I'm unlikely to scrap it even though they are charging my group a significant portion of the original cost (> 50%) to fix it.
As you can imagine, this is the last HP machine I will ever use. Granted, that doesn't mean much to HP's bottom line - I just got this machine when I switched jobs so I'm not due for a refresh for a while. I don't run the lab, so I don't have any say over the hardware they run in there. But I am in the market for a Media Center PC - luckily there are a variety of other OEMs who offer MCE (the Viewsonic looks cool).
People like Scoble scour the 'net to find people who have "fired" Microsoft. We are doing a better listening to them (note, I'm not suggesting we're done listening or that we've fixed all the issues - just that we're improving). I hope HP has someone looking for people who have fired them.