>Opened er up, pushed very hard on some important looking boards, and it poped up. Whew, there was no indication on the outside (excpet for a giant crack on the faceplate) that anything was wrong < vbg >

For real? It was really cracked? At least yours was a new machine without all your work files loaded up and development environment configured "just right". I had visions of an all-nighter just to get operational again.

I always carry a full set of CD's wherever I go (NT, 98, NT SBS, Visual Studio Enterprise, Service Packs, MSDN, etc), and have redundant copies of all development on 3 different machines, one available over the internet. But still, I forgot that little recovery disk.