I think when we have issues, it's nice to post when you have a good experience - and once again, I just have to give a shout out to the Stern distributor here in Sydney (Amusement Machine Distributors). So my Elvira went kaput on Monday and all the lower half on the playfield stopped responding (lights, coils and switches). With all of it going out, I suspected a node board problem, and on reboot, yep I got the dreaded "node board 8 not found" message. After all the obligatory connection/wiring checks, I swapped around boards 8 and 9, and the problem moved to node board 9, indicating the board itself went bad.
I emailed AMD yesterday morning (Monday was a public holiday) fully expecting my machine to be unusable for a couple of weeks at best - but they sent a new board out overnight express within a couple of hours, so it arrived this morning and Elvira is back in action. Oh I should also mention they did this free of charge as long as I sent the faulty board back to them (which I have now done), and I did not even purchase the machine from them, it was a private sale.
I just do not see this level or quality of service from *any* other company - simply brilliant guys to deal with. It's not the first time I've posted on here about how great they are, I'm sure this wont be the last time either.
Also - this game is absolutely incredible, only had it a few weeks and it's mind blowingly good!