Refurbishments...
I have reason to believe some refurbishers, are infecting PCs as well. I have at least one or two clients, that can't even use their machines, because the usual wipe and re-install; is not working. I think they not only doped the factory recovery partition, but also the bios, and firmware to the hard drive and optical drive. I have one client who had to totally wipe the drive of his DELL using Darik's Boot and Nuke, and then flash the bios and hard drive firmware, before it was even usable.
Part of the problem is OEM hardware driver incompatibility with Win7 - I warned him that it might not act like a normal PC until SP2 is released. My HP was a nightmare until SP2 was released for Vista x64, but I am sure no embedded malware was involved in my case at least.
