A link to this thread was posted over on Talkbass, and my reply there was:
"Funny, they treated me like crap and had obvious total disregard for me as a customer, and had no knowledge about the product I wanted help with, and refused to even consider servicing it. After I escalated the problem up to one of the top rungs in the company, they finally admitted the product was defective--but they still could not fix it."
IOW, this is normal operating procedure for TCE, and they are on my #### list pretty much permanently.