What's the wierdest fix you've tried that works???

[firon.livejournal.com]

for a large part of yesterday and this morning I have been trying to fix two XBox 360s - one with RROD and one with a hit and miss problem with the DVD reader (also known as the open tray problem) . I spent yesterday working on the open tray problem (this is my XBox, so it took precedence) with little to no success (it seems to work more often that it used to, but still fails to read fairly regularly).

The point of this post, however, is this morning's attempt to fix the RROD, which ties in to my attempt to fix a laptop with bad video output a few months ago. What I discovered then was that many people had managed to fix problem graphics cards by removing all plastic and heat sinks and then baking them in the oven on 385 F for about 8-10 minutes. Once cooled and reassembled, the issues were gone, apparently due to the reflow soldering effect.

Now, I was obviously severely skeptical of this working, but figured my laptop was completely useless as it was, so what was the harm? To my eternal surprise, it worked! All I did was completely remove anything from the MB that might melt at that temp (stickers, odd bits of light plastic etc), placed it on a baking sheet, suspended by four balls of aluminum foil, and baked as instructed.  Admittedly, it didn't stay functional for long (though I think this may be due to my not having put new thermal paste on the chips as I didn't have any to hand), but just the fact that it worked at all seemed something akin to the chicken sacrifice trick so often joked about.

I performed the same trick with the Xbox MB this morning, with the same result - it is now working fine (though of course I don't know how long it might last).

So now my question - what weird and near miraculous fixes have *you* done in the past that you felt sure would never work, but did?

As an aside, if anyone has any ideas on how to fix an intermittent problem with a BenQ Xbox drive (looks like it's having problems focusing the laser, based on what I've seen), apart from the POT fix that I've already tried, feel free to let me know! :)