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[ZippyDan]

Long story, I'll try to hit the highlights:

I've had an xbox gamertag for a long time: almost since xbox live started back on the original xbox.  The details are kind of fuzzy now but basically what happened is that the gamertag was linked to a hotmail account.  Maybe some of you will remember (and maybe they still do), but hotmail accounts used to be "deleted" or otherwise rendered inactive after like 60 days of non-use.  

The gamertag worked fine on the original xbox, and could be recovered via the old recovery method (name, address, credit card, etc.), but when it came time to use the gamertag on the Xbox 360, I could not recover it using the e-mail/password method.  (Again I can't remember the exact details: I think the name worked for a time on the Xbox 360 and it broke at some point perhaps when the subscription expired and I had to renew it later.)  Anyway, when I went to login online using the e-mail I found that the hotmail account had been deactivated and was no longer linked to the xbox live account.  I recreated the hotmail account, but nothing I did could rejoin the e-mail account to the xbox live account.

I called xbox live support, and they had the hotmail account listed as the one that I recreated.  Even though it was listed that way in their system, the actual link between the e-mail account and the xbox live account had been corrupted, and after hours on the phone with me and them trying everything, they finally gave up and "escalated" the problem to be researched by someone who actually knew what they were doing.  About a week later they called me back and said they couldn't fix the problem, instead they gave me a new gamertag and a free year of xbox live.

Well that was about a year and a half ago, and every couple of months I check to see if my old gamertag is available so I can spend some points to change back to the gamertag I really want.  My new gamertag is lame.  :-(  I'm pretty knowledgeable about computers and I know that the old gamertag information is stored in some database somewhere.  I would've thought that xbox live would periodically clean up their database and free up old gamertags for use - but either I'm wrong, or perhaps whatever got corrupted in the old gamertag's data is preventing it from being deleted and re-used.

I'm pretty sure that anyone who has the right kind of access to the database (and here is where I'm sure my request becomes crazy since access to the xbox live database must be heavily restricted and only a few people probably have the acces level to do what I want) could remove all references to my old gamertag with a few simple SQL queries and thus free it up for me to use again.  So I thought maybe here someone might have some connections...

Anyway it's a shot in the dark, thanks for your time.  :-)

P.S. yes I didn't give any specific info on the gamertag I'm looking for, but if anyone can help I can give you that information and any kind of verification information you might need.  e-mail me at [email protected].  Thanks.