Yup... Visual Group has always been very slack and try to swine their way out of any warranty/work. HP customer centre seems to be run by a representative, perhaps Visual Group themselves.

However, when we had issue with the PDA phone years ago, it got so bad that we called HP complaint line and every get dealt through from HP Australia/New Zealand head office and said they "are" reviewing Visual Group's behaviour.

Doesn't sound like they have made much improvement. Hope you get a call from HP to rate their service, we got a call like that when we brought our HP monitor in to HarveyNorman/VisualGroup.