I spoke to Scott earlier this week, and I understand that Steve's taking a couple days off - that means there a little short-handed for a few days. It happens to the best of folks, but I'm sure they'll get back to you soon.

Let's try a couple things, just for the sake of my curiousity. We know that the menu is appearing, but moments after it appears the screen goes black. We know that this happens with component video inputs getting either 480p (the original case where the problem occurred) or 480i (the second test with the progressive scan player and the test with the Oppo - the Oppo is only capable of 480i over component). We also know that the menu worked through composite connection directly to the projector. Since you get a brief glimpse of the menu, it is doubtful that the problem is a lack of 480i support at your projector, but a more definitive test would be to try to play a disc using either DVD player with the component video connection and the player set to 480i. (The Oppo might be the easy way to go here - if you can see the movie when played through the Oppo's component output, then the projector's component input supports 480i and we can scratch that problem off the list.) Once that's off the list, we can try some other things. First, switch to an unused video input (video 5, for example). This should give you no video because there's no source there to generate a video signal. Now try to bring up the menu and see what happens. An alternate approach would be to connect something to a composite input on the 990 (digital camera, DVD player, VCR, game console, whatever) and try that through the component output; if it works, try pulling up the menu and see what happens then. I realize all of this can get a bit tedious, but you're running into a situation that I can't yet explain and I suspect there's something we're missing.

Comparing the Oppo and the 990 is not at all an apples to apples case. The Oppo can display data on screen over DVI because it is a video player and nothing else - the majority of the Oppo's $200 cost is centered around the DVI output, with a bare minimum spent on the analog sections (hence the inability to get even 480p out of the component outputs and the Oppo's generally lackluster reputation for analog audio output). The Oppo has no audio or video switching, minimal bass management for the 5.1 analog output, a very rudimentary analog audio section, a massively smaller power supply and chassis, auto speaker setup, and a few other things left off that the 990 includes. As I said before, the reason that the 990 can't add any video data to the DVI outputs is clear: doing so would have required them to add hardware specifically to generate a video signal in the digital domain that could be passed to the DVI output. It would have been more than a few dollars (I'd guess we'd be looking at nearly a $100 increase or more, but that's just my SWAG), and the ability to get to the menus through every other video output presumably was considered sufficient reason not to add such a large cost increase to the unit. It's unfortunate, but it is also a design decision that I believe can be readily justified.