Specifically, anybody any good with debugging obscure technical issues that Customer Support misdiagnose as "must be some kind of hard drive problem, you ought to get the box swapped"?

I've got a Scientific Atlanta 8240HDC from Time Warner that gets stuck on "noCP" during OCAP boot. Some Googling and no small amount of technical reading reveals that this means "No Copy Protection", or more formally "Host Not (Yet) Authorized". This message is usually displayed during boot while the OCAP host is bonding to the OCAP card, and the two are then validating with the service provider. Normally, the boot process continues, and all is well. Abnormally, the boot process stops with a Copy Protection error code, CPxx where xx is 01, 02, 03, 04, 05, or 08, representing the return value from the CP_valid_cnf() call. In my case, it's just hanging on "noCP" without progressing to give me a return value.

My question for you guys, I suppose, is what magic word(s) I need to utter to get to talk to someone clueful-enough at TWC to help me figure out whether this really is a box-swap issue (e.g. a hard fault in the card), or if someone on their end just needs to press a button to get the host to be validatable again.