@supersignmart - I feel your pain, honestly, I've been through it all as well. Just a note however. HP decided to purchase ColorSpan for the technology and so they inherited the mess. It's not truly fair to judge them on ColorSpan alone. There are tons of excellent HP machines that are just rock solid, it's just the dang ColorSpan's. As far as support and everything else, nothing has changed but the name, so you're still dealing with the same people and the same issues.
Though I'm not pleased overall with our FB910 (9840) it's finally running now with no errors in 1 month. That's a first for us after installing it in 12/06. Came down to the fact that they never informed us that they discovered that you cannot use isopropyl alcohol to clean the encoder strip, it eats away at it. We were trained to clean it that way, as we have been as well on our 72s for the last 4 years. Our machine would cancel mid print with no errors or anything, just quit and it was a total crapshoot if you were going to be able to make it through a 4x8 sheet. I had a job of 35 4x8 sintra panels and it died on 8 sheets. We've had nearly 40 sheets of MDO wasted.