Got a unit from expansys (US) 3 weeks back. One week of ownsership and got hit by the dreaded WSOD one morning. They were kind enough to issue a refund after the rma return.

Hold on, dude. The WSOD is 770 only, not N800. Some of the symptoms are that everything still works, except for the screen: you can still turn it off via OS, still communicate PC-to-MMC, etc.

update on my situation expansys emailed and said they will organise a replacement. My WSOD was also sudden, turned on the unit one morning and screen was all vertical lines, now it's all faded vertical lines. I hope expansys can replace it as they are showing no stock available.

Granted I already have an n800 but this was an additional 770 which I got but had the WSOD. And you correct - one could still boot it and login via ssh etc.
Got another 770 from Tigerdirect recently - hopefully this one would last longer.

Sorry, and thanks for the update! I'm curious where your new 770 shipped from. I read somewhere the buy.com ones are coming from Carrollton TX, same town as Woot. Probably same warehouse.

No problem. I bought mine in one of their retail stores here in Toronto, Canada, so really not sure which warehouse it came from. But this is made in Estonia so could be the same or similar batch as the rest of the places?

Oh man. I Just got the WSoD this morning while in class! any pointers or tips to tell Nokia when I call them? i got my 770 on the woot/buy.com deal

is there ANY chance this could be caused by mucking around inside the case? Because I just performed zapwizard's usb charge mod (with a separate switch) and it worked fine when i powered it on the first few times after (even have pictures of it working afterwards) but then i got WSOD after rebooting again (i rebooted because the default 'web' program was crashing).
Flasher utility doesn't work: it says it can't find the device (i had my switch set so that plugging in USB didn't charge the unit, so it doesn't think that the charger is plugged in).
Tablet does at least recognize when USB is plugged in because it makes a noise and pops up a message (which i can't read obviously, probably telling me it can't mount the MMC because it's in use as swap)

obviously there's no way I can send it in for warranty - i got it secondhand off ebay and modified the hardware of at least 3 pieces (back plastic housing, silver shell [stylus accessibility and removed the front center piece so i can remove the cover without interfering with the cords], and the USB plug itself). I'll just suck it up and drop another $150 on a new one because it's worth it (and I already purchased all the accessories and such for GPS).

so back to my original question: could this be in any way caused be the hardware mods I did or did my luck turn at the wrong time?
next question: does this ruin the LCD or just the controller?

EDIT:
can anyone help me log in remotely to the tablet to see if it really does still work? Unfortunately it does not automatically connect to wifi so i will have to do some screen guesswork to try to get it connected

Do some research - the answers are in this forum...

Assuming you have a true WSoD and haven't killed your device with one of your mods, the answer to your question is "No", you were just unlucky and fried your LCD chip due to the race condition design flaw when booting to fix your web problem. And there is nothing you can do to fix it, apart from getting it repaired by Nokia. Which as you sumise, is unlikely to happen.

I apologize if my question seemed to be borne only of ignorance. I had already done research; I just wanted a bit more confirmation, especially due to my poor timing. Hardware mod, then relatively immediate application issues, then WSOD sounds a bit too bad to be coincidence, so I just wanted to be sure.

the WSOD I get is a white, vertically streaked image. If I hold the display at enough of an angle I can sort of make out the 'nokia' lettering, then "Don't Panic" on my boot screen. The screen goes a bit dark when it makes the noise for completing the boot, as my background is black (no image). Basically the same thing as Quackles at the beginning of this thread

I bought another one (from memturbo on this forum) because (while it worked) i liked the IT so much that i figured it'd be worth it to get another working one. So I'll try to swap the modified parts out from the old one and send the old one in with unmodded parts in a desperate and slightly questionable attempt to get it fixed.