Well, I would say that I could hook you up with a used HR10-250, but DirecTV might have sent out the kill signal to these boxes. Ours "stopped working" on Friday. On Friday an installer came out and made some upgrades to our DirecTV system, which included the new dish and an HR20 in the family room. This unfortunately meant no Tivo in the main viewing area, but since our antenna stopped getting OTA HD signals, we didn't have a choice.

But the HR10-250 was reused in another room that had an HDTV. When we hooked it up, we kept getting error messages about the card, and after many hours on the phone with DirecTV, they pretty much told us tough luck and now the Tivo is essentially useless. We can still watch recorded programs, but we only get the preview channels. Even this would be okay, except for some unknown reason, when a DirecTivo is disconnected from its service, it is not possible to view your season passes! Granted, we should have written them down before the switch, but I think it was safe to assume that we'd have access to them afterward. So we had to guess when adding shows to the HR20.

Sorry, onto your issue:

I will say that Rob R is right, the HR20 is a nice unit. It's not nearly as bad as I thought it would be, and there are a few things about the visual look of the UI that I like more than Tivo. For instance, everything seems crisper, but that's probably because Tivo stupidly used SD menus and icons for the HR10-250.

Personally, I'm looking forward to getting FIOS when I move into my new place in July. I know it's expensive, but I'm going with an S3 (it's down to $599 now, and should be lower by then). I was very excited to see that just today, Engadget had an article about a simple button hack for getting eSATA drives to work! (the HR20 can use eSATA drives already)

I'm with you, though. I just can't drop the Tivo service. I've had it for almost six years now, and there's not a smoother, easier, more pleasant UI out there.