Corrupt New Program Disk; A Follow Up

[CornDawg]

Roxio responded to my trouble ticket and I dialogged back and forth with the Roxio tech support people a few times.

 

I asked them to look up the serial number that came with the allegedly "brand new, unregistered, 100% guaranteed genuine software 2 disk set CD & Unique Activation . NOT AN OEM!" copy of EMC 9 Deluxe Suite I purchased from an eBay seller in Florida.

 

Roxio Tech Suport informed me that the serial number had ALREADY been registered by another user, though the support rep did not tell me when it was registered.

 

Consequently, I returned the disk to the seller, who did provide me with a refund after a short delay. I simply reminded the seller that I had not yet left feedback via eBay.

 

The seller claims he gets the disks from a Roxio distributor - and the disks in fact look brand new to me - they are silk-screened and water-proof as I'd expect from a pressed disk. The program extras disk looks completely new and unused without a single scratch. The scratch / inclusion on the disk he sent me is clearly embedded in the substrate (?) and not a mechanical scratch from user handling. Apparently it was one from the bad batch reported elsewhere in this sub-forum.

 

The seller also claimed that my report of a previously registered s/n (per Roxio) is the first time he's ever had such a complaint. He's sold and gotten feedback on at least 4 units (per user feedback) and has had as many as 10 more for sale (per sellers link to all items for sale). Just yesterday when I entered my feedback, I see that he's got EMC 10 DLX STE for sale at $28.50.

 

Note that I have provided all my information to Roxio Tech Supt should they want to check out the sale of previously registered software. I have also given the seller a 'neutral' feedback, since he did finally refund my purchase price and claims he gets the disks legitimately. I have to take his word on that. The seller's profile is at http://myworld.ebay.com/tcdistributionfl/ if interested to see for yourself.

 

Lastly, thanks to Dave for the friendly and helpful conversation via private message.

 

I also apologize for being huffy in my previous posts. For the odd situation like mine, I can see why Roxio would not want to provide a link to a digital download.

 

Jack

 

[Brendon]

Thanks for the feedback, Jack. It makes very interesting reading.

 

I wonder if the disc you returned to your eBay vendor had previously been sold by him, but returned [after registration] by the customer for the same reason you returned it to him. He would deserve no better than neutral feedback if he re-sells merchandise which was previously returned defective.

 

 

[CornDawg]

I wonder if the disc you returned to your eBay vendor had previously been sold by him, but returned [after registration] by the customer for the same reason you returned it to him. He would deserve no better than neutral feedback if he re-sells merchandise which was previously returned defective.

 

That would be hard to imagine, Brendon. When I launched the install, it just put up the initial 'setup' box and stalled. Following advice here, I tried to copy it to the hard drive to launch from there, but it had multiple read failures. Finally using XCOPY command, logged to the screen, it was every occurrence of RSL.DLL and a couple other major EXE and DLL files that were corrupt and would not copy. I ran it through 3 machines and all failed at the same point, which was long before any prompt to enter a serial number. The Sound Max directory was totally corrupt.

 

Note that when logging the file copy results to the screen with XCOPY, I did note that 1 copy of each of the corrupt files did come across - but because RSL.DLL exists in about 6-8 directories, the install hung. I thought about trying to drag the one good copy of the file to all the other directories where it failed to copy, and try the install again, but by then I was at my wits end and with the responses here and to my trouble ticket reply from Roxio, decided I should sent it back.

 

He was communicative when I bought the product and when I wrote at first to report the problem and said I was going to first try to resolve it with a digital download from Roxio if I could find one ... however the moment I reported the used serial number and that I wanted a refund, the communication was slow / not at all. I was amazed that he wanted a defective disk with used serial number back ... but he said it was to obtain a replacement from his distributor.

 

Who knows. I've bought from eBay 40 times in 5 years - about 1 in 10 transactions have a problem - so I trust most sellers. Negative feedback does them in quickly or eBay deals with them. I have not ever bought software through eBay before now, though.

 

Live and learn, I guess.