But more important -- about once an evening it would decide that a quiet/dark scene in a program was a commercial break, and would take off and start fast-forwarding through the program looking for the end of the "break" which never came.

I had this argument with Tod the other night.

"I've seen products which tried to skip commercials, but if they never saw the 'end' of the commercial they would fast forward past the show," he says. I think that he, too, was referring to a VCR he'd seen.

What you and Tod are forgetting is that the Replay is a PVR and has the entire show on the hard disk. It can detect both potential "in" and "out" points of each commercial break. If there's not an out-point within X number of minutes of an in-point, then it can assume it was a "false" and won't try skipping that particular commercial.