If I recall correctly, there are some fuses in the player itself that are self-resetting. This would also be accompanied by a smell. But there are other components that will burn out completely and would tend to produce a smell as well. So that doesn't necessarily mean he's home free.

But if he's lucky, he only needs to wait a while, and then plugging in a proper power supply will work. Dunno how long "a while" is, I thought it was only a few minutes.

Last time this happened, the person had plugged in a power supply that output an AC voltage instead of a DC voltage. The result was a similar set of symptoms, and I seem to recall that David had to fix it because some stuff did get fried. Anyone have that thread link handy?