After a long, heated discussion with an Xbox Live support technician last night, it turns out that my latest issue - where I’m unable to get the latest dashboard update so I can’t log into Xbox Live - is actually pretty common.  According to the technician, they’ve been getting hammered with calls from people who are having the exact same problem.  These problems are coupled with the fact that the update has caused some unexpected new load on the Xbox Live servers (undoubtedly the use of the new Friends of Friends feature coupled) and that seems to be coupled with the unexplained issue that there are several folks like me who are just plain “locked out.”

They’re going to send me a DVD with the last dashboard update on it (not the Fall 2007 one, but the Spring 2007 one) and that’s supposed to at least unlock things long enough for me to recover my profile so I can play… well, anything.  Can’t do much without your profile.  As for being “unlocked,” the answer was just to “keep trying to take the update

• when you can take it, you know it’s fixed.”  No ETA on that, by the way.

I’m surprised no gaming sites have reported this issue, but then, I’m sure this crap happens on every dashboard update.

UPDATE: The problem was corruption on my hard drive. They ended up sending me a new hard drive.