This is totally off topic, but I’ve found a solution to a Wii error that I could not find anywhere on the interwebs, and I want to document it here for Google to find.
The situation: Wii, purchased in May 2007, working fine. Got some new games at Christmas (Ben 10, Guitar Hero III, Links crossbow training, and some others) that worked ok for a few weeks. The Wii continues to recognize all those discs, but suddenly won’t play the games on them, bouncing me back to the Wii menu from a black screen every time I click on the game icon to play it.
The resolution: I had originally connected my Wii to my home network using a D-Link USB ethernet adapter (DWL-122). The helpful dude at Nintendo said that while non-Nintendo licensed adapters may work to connect the unit to the network, and may even work fine with all games for a while, newer games have been known to suddenly enter a state of not working when non-official hardware is connected into the system. This was the second thing he checked (after system software version), so apparently they run into it a lot.
I unplugged the adapter, powered on the Wii, and the games have started playing again. Whether or not this is all a ploy to force me to buy their more expensive network adapter is totally immaterial, as my 6 year old will now stop bugging me mercilessly to get the Wii fixed.
Sidenote: It only took me a couple menus to get to a real, live, helpful human. I could have gotten to him even faster, but I decided to have the computer walk me through a couple moron-level debugging steps (“check to be sure your game is inserted right side up”).
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