A good cleaning, or just blasting the insides with compressed air, seems to alleviate some of the skipping problems. at least it's not as bad as "upside-down-PS1-syndrome" which is still nonexistent in Sony's eyes.

I don't think that Walmart "trick" will work. Besides being dubious, I think most stores scan the serial number on the systems when you buy them, to prevent this exact thing from happening (which is why all consoles have a hole in the box exposing their serial numbers). Of course, you could try to get around it, but that's going into pretty criminal territory... like shrink wrapping an old game and trying to return it.

Could the cause of this be the cd-rom based games like Knockout Kings(blue discs) 2001? My friend said that the games that arent burned on dvd's could mess up the laser. Is this true? Cus I just got Knockout Kings 2001 a few days ago and he didn't want to play it on his ps2 cus he said it might mess it up. Thanks.

The Walmart trick does work. The serial number sticker is removable. However, a guy at work said he has had luck just by taking a cotton swab with a little water and gently cleaning the laser. Of course you have to take apart the console to do this. He has gotten at least two PS2s that I know of to work by doing this.

However, if you can get Sony to fix it for free with a phone call then I think thats well worth a try before anything else.