Update

Today an engineer called me.

Very nice guy.

"You aren't going to tell me it sounds like a bad radio card, are you?" I asked.

"Er . . . no," he replied, a touch defensively. "How do you know it isn't?"

I had my list of serial numbers ready. And my small herd of worthless machines, cheerfully offering kidneys to anyone who could track them on the network. IP addresses, missed beacons, pings, etc.

Surprisingly (not), he has never seen anything like this.

Imagine that.

He insisted faxing me a list of things that could interfere with the Bluetooth signal, despite the fact that I pointed out it would affect the working models, too. And I walked the store with the list just to make sure.

So now we are waiting for a call from a parliament of programmers.