I swore one time that my Windows 95 machine got hosed up, nothing worked right.

this was right after playing a bit of the original Half-life, sometime between 10pm and midnight, after my brother had gone to bed, with nice thick headphones and a pitch-black room. I had hit one part that was startling enough that I jumped, slamming the mouse into the keyboard out of surprise.

strangely, half-life wouldn't work right after that. I quit, and windows wouldn't work right. I rebooted, still nothing.

10-15 minutes of silent cursing and wondering what the hell just happened, I happened to look at my mouse, and see that the 4th button, on the side, the one I had bound to the backspace key in the control panel, seemed to be stuck in "clicked" mode, wedged under the side casing of the mouse.

I pried it out, and magically, windows starting working fine again. half-life too.

that one always makes me smile, how half-life scared me so much that I accidentally "broke" my computer.

this isn't directly related to support, just my personal anecdote about this 2nd-guessing you've explained so well:

A few years back I had a girlfriend. really. and I bought an original xbox because she liked video games.

We were playing some game, Hunter, I believe, because it had a redhead on the cover(take a guess at that one)

as most of us know, sometimes, sometimes quite often, when you kill someone in a video game, they may drop a weapon. and, depending on the game, or the situation in the game, they may not necessarily drop a weapon. either way, this is usually very visible on screen.

well this girl stumbled across a weapon on the ground after killing someone, and then decided she must run over every single killed enemy's body for their weapon, even though she'd only seen this with a very small percentage of the enemies we had killed so far(like maybe 25% at best), and could visually look to know whether or not there was a weapon on the ground anywhere on screen.

despite my going to school for and being employed as a computer programmer, despite my having played hundreds more hours of video games than her, despite clear visual evidence within the game itself, no suggestion, no explanation, no comment of any sort on my part could convince her that only SOME of the characters we killed would actually drop a weapon. She just HAD to check every single dead body for a weapon, not by looking on screen, but by running over their dead body with her character.

needless to say, it made the game take quite a bit longer, and killed any desire I had to play video games with her, or try to carry on any rational semi-intelligent conversation. if you don't have that, man, then you've really got less than nothing when the sex runs out ;-)