Baph

Nah, the above issue happens on all their boxes. It doesn't matter if you have the basic one, Sky+, or the HD compatible box.

It's all essentially the same equipment, with a PCI board inside for the add-on's, and each one in a different case to accomodate the flashing lights & buttons.

I'm told that what basically happens is that when they send a "critical" update to the box, if the update is interrupted, the box is "unusable." This was a serious flaw in the design a few years back, as an "interruption" could be using the remote!! (Why do you think they now have a flashing light to say "update in progress").

Back then, an "unusable" box was just that, you needed a new one. They sorted that out quickly though by patching it to keep a last known good setup. That's what the soft-reset does, it over-writes the setup with the last known good.

To perform the soft-reset takes all of 60 seconds, and in all honesty, it happens so infrequently I'm supprised that Sky don't sing from the roof tops about it. They could say they have a known issue, and this is the fix for it. They'd gain a lot of brownie points from us geeks.

*a critical update is defined as one that alters the core operating system.