Red Ring of Death - Round 2

I had an XBox 360 replaced in November 2006, a casualty of the infamous RRoD problem (Red Ring of Death). Gears of War was just relased, and it's intense graphics processing took a toll on many XBoxes during the 2006 holiday season. I was forced to take a leave of absence from achieving gamerscore points for 3 whole weeks (the length of time it took to get my replacement XBox). The "new" XBox got me another year's worth of warranty, WOOHOO!

A whole year goes by without a problem...but literally days after my warranty expires I get this:


One blinking red light, and an error message telling me to contact XBox Customer Support. "E 74"...whatver that means?!?!?! I gave the customer support center a call, and they said that it would cost me $99 to repair. "WHAT?!, I thought there was a 3yr warranty for all XBox 360s?!?!?!" The rep explained to me that the 3yr deal only applies to the 3 flashing lights problem...not the 1,2, or 4 flashing light problems. I was furious, but eventually surrendered my 16 digit Visa number to them. I can look forward to another 3 weeks with no xboxlive :(

I've done some digging on the web to see if others were experiencing this issue, and as expected I found a few topics at the xbox.com forums:

Thread 1

Thread 2

Thread 3

Why is Microsoft limiting the 3yr warranty to the 3 lights issue, when apparently there are other hardware issues that are much too common? By reading some other user's comments, I might be lucky that this is only the 2nd time that I'm going through this. I'd be half as angry right now if MS started a swap-out program, just as EA is doing with the RockBand guitars. Then I wouldn't have to wait 3 whole weeks to build upon my gamerscore. ARRGGGGGHHH!!!