SLJ. I feel for you man.
Finally get first mac and get into a crappy situation like this. Kind of shatters the whole belief of apple being a super reliable and "no problem" company. I don't think you should have bought anything from those sly resellers, as they are known scammers.
But what's done is done. I'd try going hard on them with the replacement. If they refuse, I'd do anything possible to screw up their reputation and let them know that. If you didn't sign any contract with them, you can even try civil court as they sold you faulty equipment. Unless of course pbook was sold "as is".
If all above fails, I'd try selling item on ebay stating that the model has this strange problem, but other than that works great. You will lose around 25% - 30%, but you would be able to recover some money out of it.
But those are drastic steps. First, I'd go to official apple store and ask them what that could be caused by. Try calling them, see what they say. Then, I'd attempt to reinstall everything, format hdd etc. You can also try seeking help at microsoft website, somepeople there [MVP], regular users, are very knowledgeable about things like that, even for mac.
If I come up with anything good on how to deal with this w/o having to return it or sell it, I'll let you know here.
