The guy on Xbox tech support told me that something else must be causing scratches in virtually every disc I put into my system. That, or I was flipping my Xbox 360 on its end while a disc was in the drive. Nope. It hadn’t moved an inch since I installed it. Brand new discs were getting these awful rings in them. I was getting pissed. GRAW was frustrating…. Gears was a travesty…. But when I saw the demonic grooves appear on my Vegas disc…. That was the last straw.

Armed with a little mag light and a little mirror, I took a close look inside my Xbox 360. Looking at the little lens-laser thingie (Hey… I play games…. I’m not an engineer) that I’m assuming is what reads the data from the disc, I noticed this little pip of plastic sticking up. It was so small that I almost missed it. Determined to find a solution I ruminated for a bit.

On a whim, I grabbed this old CD Lens cleaner disc that I’ve had for god-knows-how-long and popped it in. It has these little bristles on the data side of the CD, and it plays a tone as it cleans. In the media player screen I played the “cleaning” track for about 30 seconds.

When I popped the disc out and looked at the lens-laser thingie again, the pip was gone. Since that day, over a month ago, I have not experienced a single groove being etched into my games, nor have I had a single solitary instance of THIS.

I understand, from a recent article on Joystiq, that MS is answering some questions about this problem with the European Commissioner for Consumers. I’m sure they’ll get to the bottom of this in short order, but in the mean time, I’ll be happy to lend you my solution.