i had my xbox modded for like 8 months and never got banned, played live all the time, i bought another xbox a month before the 8 month above to mod for my sister, since i had the other box and my sister hadnt gave me the cash for it yet i decided to go on live to play with buddies in GRIT because another friend of mine had my original, i played the whole the night like 6 hours till 3 and the next day i couldnt get back on, i was banned, so i kept the other bax and transferred my gamertag to it through the memory card and havent had any problems since and still play it, recently i screwed up the chipped box and had to move the chip into the non chipped box, i had a 120 gig drive in the old one that crashed and i couldnt load even a boot disk, so i moved the chip to the unmodded boc put in a 160 gig and have be on live for over a week with no problems, every back up i make i take out the updatedsah.xbe stuff and leave it at that, i would have to say it something with eeprom matching, even though you flashed your eeprom do you really know how many other people might actually have that epprom, maybe that is the case who knows but id have to say id rule out the upgraded HDD cause i played with one installed for quite some time