Regarding my Sky+ box. I think it might have been recording something when the power cut happened. Therefore it was writing to the HD when it lost power and we all know what can happen then. Not really something the developers of the box could do much about, although some short term UPS system that quickly stops the recording and powers down the HD before losing it's charge might have fixed that.

I actually had more problems with the standard Sky boxes I had before the Sky+ box. My first box lasted a couple of years before finally not working and just displayed a no satellite signal error message all of the time. But before that it would often lock up or lose its signal and require a power off to reset it.

After that one went wrong it was replaced with a horrible Grundig box which started to smoke and overheat to the point of nearly catching fire just 10 minutes after the Sky engineer had installed it and driven off! I'm sure that one was a dodgy box the engineer had in his van from a previous call out and he tried to palm me off with it. But a week later I finally got another box which was new as the engineer unwrapped it. And I do still have that one in the other room as I've got multiroom. Although it is a bit temperamental. It sometimes breaks up and pixelates on certain channels, and on some of the lifestyle channels it loses the sound and you have to move to another channel and back again to get the sound back.