I have, as you’ve no doubt determined, been very happy with my DVR and DirecTV service since it was installed on Saturday — but there appears to be a technical problem.

Sunday afternoon, without warning, my DirecTV receiver/DVR suddenly gave me a blue screen of death, reset itself, and then began walking me through the same setup process that I’d observed the installer going through on Saturday morning. I didn’t know the answers to some of the questions — plus, I realized that something was wrong — and so I called DirecTV customer support. The technician walked me through the process and said it was probably a software upgrade and would be a very rare occurrence.

In any case, I lost the scheduled programs I’d already programmed into the DVR, and I had to wait several hours for the program guide to re-download itself, a few hours at a time, before I could schedule recordings too far in advance.

But, no matter, because the technician assured me it was a one-time or very rare occurrence.

Right?

Well, it did exactly the same thing this evening. I called and began talking to another tech support person, who was on the verge of scheduling a technician to come out and check on me, when — it never rains but it pours — my cordless phone’s battery went dead. So now, I had to call back, and obviously there was no way to reconnect me with the same technician.

The new tech support person wanted to try something different — reformatting the hard drive on my DVR/receiver. That’s happening right now, but it’s supposed to take an hour and a half or more. In the process of telling me how to trigger the reformat, she told me to press two buttons at the same time and hold them until the “record” light turned on. This was harder than it sounded, because the “record” light was located right in the center of one of the two buttons I was supposed to be holding down.

Somehow — and this is pure intuition — this doesn’t seem like a software problem, and I’m skeptical that the reformat will do anything to solve it. I wish I’d been able to stay on the line with the previous technician.

In any case, every time the machine resets it forgets the information for my local TV stations, and the DirecTV technician has to turn them back on. That can’t be done while the disk is reformatting, so, once the reformat is complete, I’ll have to call back and get my locals turned back on, if tech support is even answering their calls by that time.

I really do like the DirecTV service so far and I’m hopeful that this problem can be resolved quickly.