Well although they were fast with my sons Zune repair, it was hard to prove warranty. I had to get to my friend who once worked at Circuit City to help find a receipt to prove purchase date because they would not honor the warranty at first.
When my wife's unit failed, I gave her mine. Zune service people told us they would not honor the warranty on the 7 month old unit. I bought it new on Ebay, but did not have an original store proof of purchase. The touchpad froze and the unit is useless (like the one my son had). Their response was, "did your wife play games on it". Well she did and apparently the Zune games caused the failure. Bad design I guess. I now find that many, (probably as many as 66% of all the purchases), ended up in failure of the touchpad if the people played games on their unit.
I finally went and bought an Ipod Touch and Iphone. These units are reliable and don't seem to have any of the design flaws that Microsoft seems to be plagued with. What is more, their service is very helpful. I should have suspected the Zune to be a failure after speaking with Bill Gates at the CES show when Windows 95 came out. He said "Windows 3.1 was full of bugs that caused the infamous blue screen of death". "With Windows 95, we have virtually eliminated that blue screen of death" "It performs without all the computer lockups you have been use to having". Well we all know this was not true - why believe that any of their products since are any better. Its all about marketing!