Rumor has it that a spike in Xbox 360 returns, both valid and not so much, have lead to an increase in the return time for repaired Xbox 360s.

I've heard that the turnaround time for Xbox 360 repairs has skyrocketed to as long as six weeks and if you do the math, that could mean that some loyal 360 fans may be console-less when the Halo 3 launches. Talk about bad juju.

Sure Microsoft has been flooded with a slew of Xbox 360s returned after blinking the dreaded Red Ring of Death, but we hear that not all of them were due to overheating.

When the console seizes up and dies, three of the "circle of light's" quadrants blink red, but when the video cable pops out four of the quadrants blink. Apparently, a large number of consoles returned to Microsoft with the dreaded Red Ring of Death were perfectly fine and just the victim of a bit of red ring hysteria.

There have been so many returns, in fact, that we've been told Microsoft plans on disabling the four ring error code on future builds of the console. No word on whether they will remove the three-ring coding as well.