Should Creative announce a product reca

Question

Considering the large volume of unhappy customers, to put it mildly, and the ongoing X-Fi fiasco would Creative be wise to save the ever shrinking customer base and bad PR by recalling all X-Fi products?
Or at the very least offer those effected a full refund?...it seems to me that the X-Fi was not throughly tested on a wide range of hardware and PC configurations before the lauch of the card.
Seems they did not communicate with third parties until after the release and are now struggling to save face and catch up, only reacting to customer complaints when the issues surrounding the X-Fi became more vocal and public.
The recent statement from Creative is an insult to customers, many of whom are proficient in PC hardware and many of whom have built their PC's from scratch.
People using X-Fi and Fatalty cards are techno geeks and gamers, they know ALL about Dual Channel memory and which DIMM slots to place the memory in, and many have upgraded to 2GB to play games such as F.E.A.R. and Battlefield 2.
Yet Creative insult the intellegence of these same people with pathetic statements about buffer overflow and insufficient memory.
It's shocking they were only able to replicte the problem themselves two months ago, yet these forums reported the problem within a month of the X-Fi release.
In essence they were saying...if we can't replicate the issue in our lab it dosen't exist, a rather condesending a rude attitude to take toward customers who fund that lab and the techs inside it.
It's time we as paying consumers stand our ground on this issue, if Creative are allowed to release a product that has not been fully tested then what is to stop other companies from doing the same?
We bought into the hype and PR, we paid a large sum of money for what is still an overly inflated price tag for such a product and that product has not li'ved up to customers most BASIC expectations.
That being a functioning product able to run on any hardware or configuration, regular driver updates...at least every 2-3 months.
Software updates, no bloatware, remove unnesscary rubbish like X-Fi splash screens that take up 40megs of HDD space, the removal of unnesscary startup items, the removal of nagging screens and menus forcing you to register your product.
If a customer wants to register they should do it when they choose, not be nagged by some silly app asking them to fill in personal information.
The thing about customers is this, they remember...so when the X-Fi 2 comes out those burned will avoid it and go with another competitor.
Reputations are broken on the back of negati've feedback, what we are seeing on this forum should give Creative pause for thought.

Answer 1

Hi Cryogenic,
The petition and statement are more of a coincidence. I had posted a few times hinting I would have more information, the very long statement was being worked on, and things got a bit hectic as the petition went up around the same time, and then the Inquirer article (and the follow-up which linked to the new thread).
As far as the old thread being closed, I explained that in the other thread. New people were joining the thread all the time and the thread was so long, they just wouldn't read it. This lead to a lot of people reposting information and missing statements we'd posted, and everything generally got very "messy" and I don't believe it was helping many (new) people. No one is trying to make the old thread disappear, in fact the first thing I did in the new thread, was link to the old one! This way new people that join the board (and undoubtedly there will be after the petition, Inquirer articles, and so on) will quickly see the latest info, instead of digging their way through a very long thread, but the old thread is linked there so they can read the previous history if they want to.
Hope that clarifies things a bit,
Cat