Sorry for the "fishing"... it is that those of us on the forums don't know which message other forum members may be watching, so the reasoning is to post at least 2 or 3 different threads in the hope that someone (like yourself) will at least notice one of them.

I am still wondering if the PS3 system firmware update isn't playing a factor in any of this as well.

Regardless, I appreciate the in-depth response and I will test those suggestions out to see if they work on my machine.

PS: is there a way to create a DVD with menus and such AND have the 720p video? In another question, I was wondering if there was a way to do this and put it into an ISO file, so after download one could use IMGburn to simply burn the ISO to disc and have the best of both worlds (720p image and have a menu with possible extras)