Description: When the hard disk in the empeg is not found, the sad tux is displayed with the message "no hard disk found, contact support". If I turn of the ignition, the empeg remains powered on in this state.

Expected result: Upon turning off the ignition, the empeg should turn off immediately. It cannot honour the timeout setting in config.ini, since it's on a (now dead) disk.

Actual result: the empeg remains powered on at the error screen.

and

uh...isn't reporting bugs an exercise in futility at this point?

Not entirely.

If something like that happens more than just once, I could be motivated to work around it in Hijack.

All of my notebooks have the full empeg/hijack development environment on them, even to this day.