Amen! Preach it!

I'm sure the resistor thing has been phased out by now. I have a feeling that was for the last test, as the CompTIA website says nothing about it.

And you're right, get a new cable. There's instructions in this book on how to clean a keyboard (take all the keys off and wipe down with whatever). Keyboards are cheap. There's at least 5 extras lying around my 17-person office.

The thing I find funny about the exam is that they ask you these very questions about specific IRQ settings and what-not, they only take 20-30 questions to test you, and you get an hour and a half! That gives you 3 to 4.5 minutes to answer each multiple choice question, which range from:
"Which IRQ is used for LPT2?"
to
"Here are a bunch of computer parts. Circle the motherboard" (seriously, I had this one in a sample test)

So in other words, when I took one of these 30 question tests, it took me about 5 minutes to finish because the questions were either beyond my memorization, or too easy to spend any time on.