It was supposed to be a simple mission

It was supposed to be a simple mission.
Fix the dashboard menu on my brother's xbox, after it mysteriously turned blank last night.
I reckoned 30 minutes - max.

That was before realising that I had to manually set the IP address on his PC so I could FTP in, as the default network on the xbox was different.
That was before realising how slow his PC was because it was riddled with virii and spyware.
That was before discovering that his dashboard was Anod-X, something which I had never seen before.

After figuring out the menu definition, we FTPed a new config file - and all seemed good. But for some reason, the config file would then get corrupted or wiped intermittently after exiting the previous program, and then default to a blank menu. Very strange - and frustrating!
After a couple hours of this, I decided to install good ol' Evolution X instead.

That and XBoxMediaCentre. Now THAT is a brilliant piece of software.
I had been running the same old version for the last year, and only recently decided to install the latest CVS build. I'm glad I did. It's a totally different animal.
Much prettier (with the 360 look) and feature packed.
Plus it plays any video file I can stream to it. Even the ones that won't play on my PCs.

But I digress. Anyway, the 30 minute job ended up taking over 4 hours.
Isn't that so typical of an IT problem?
For my next trick: I say we nuke all of those virii on that darn PC. Reformat. It's the only way to be sure.

We had dinner in Dickson. My first time at the Zeffirelli Pizza Resturant. And it won't be the last. The food was great. And the servings were generous. Bart managed to finish a whole pizza (albeit a smallish one) by himself.