I had this exact same symptom on my Droid Incredible yesterday. The microphone worked fine for a voice search (I was afraid of hardware failure), so I just rebooted and everything went back to normal. Curiously, outbound calls I could hear the other person by they could not hear me, and inbound call was dead silent.

We offer a "live help" service to our customers. We used to use PHPLive! (paid app) until they vanished out of existence leaving us with several major security holes. We replaced that with Crafty Syntax Live Help (CSLH) which is open source and works reasonably well and seems to be pretty safe. I had it scanned by ScanAlert to test against XSS and SQL injection type attacks, and anything else that may raise alarms for "HackerSafe" certification.

The only feature we want that it doesn't have is "rate this operator" at the end of the chat session.

They want to find porn and/or stuff to hand over to the RIAA.

If you put movies on your laptop, delete them after you watch them or before you come home.

If you have a reasonable amount of music you should be safe.

They won't care what your pictures are unless they are pornographic.

But for absolute safety, you must save your pictures to some other device you're not carrying with you in case they decide to take it from you for whatever reason they make up. A network backup is the best bet, and using an encrypted service like JungleDisk is very smart.

Definitely image your laptop to a USB drive you leave at home before you head out, to make recovery faster.