Back in May my first 360 became a brick. I was lucky enough to get a Red Ring of Death before Microsofts change to thier warranty and desperate enough to have a working 360 that I traded it in minus the refurbishing fee and bought another one. Now a scant six months later I find my 360 acting up again but in an entirely new and peculiar way.

I do not have the dreaded Red Rings. What I do have is an inability to connect properly to XBOX Live. I Have done all the standard troubleshooting: checked my connection, cables, router and still I am denied. Whenever I turn on my system it will allow me to log into my profile but it will not auto-connect to live. No big deal I thought to myself i had experianced this before but when I tell it to connect the dashboard sits on the revolving sign in and never connects.

Oddly enough I discovered that if I backed out of the sign in screen after I had told it to connect i would mysteriously be connected to Live. I was able to access downloadable content and even join online matches. However, within minutes without fail the system would freeze. Also while I had seemingly tricked it into connecting, any attempt to access my messages or friends list would similarly freeze the system. Distressed at the possibility of a dead system just before the holidays I tested my capability to play non-online games and found that it would both function fine when not accessing online content and mysteriously tell me when friends logged on though I was "not logged in to xbox live".

With the Live update coming tonight I can;t help but wonder if this is related somehow. Has anyone experianced anything like this before? Any suggestions on how to fix it?

-Robert

(Thanks to Certis' webmaster wizardry for giving me the ability to post a new post again. Huzzah!)