Sky box shafted?

[Intya]

I'm at the in-laws house, and the Sky box seems to be on it's last legs. I figure they've had it for coming up to two years now, and in the past few days the guide seems to lock up. The actual signal is still watchable, and channels can still be changed, but nothing appears bar the background of the guide when you press the button.

It's been umpteen years since I had anything to do with sky, I'm NTL/Virgin faithful, but I tried the usual suspects of unplugging the box & card for ten minutes, plugging it all back in, and it fixes the problem for a day, but it keeps recurring.

Is it time to convince them to switch tor Virgin for everything they need? As far as I recall, if your Sky box kicked the bucket, Sky charged for a repair as you bought the box, not loaned it like with Virgin. It's a Thomson box, unlike any of the Pace models I remember seeing shortly after Sky Digital came in.

Is it worth them phoning up Sky and saying something along the lines of "fix the box or I'm off to Virgin"? Switching to them is a "hassle" they could do without, but I hate seeing people between a rock & a hard place