I'm not sure what the flubber animation is. I've never tried to remove the dvd drive, but I'm intrigued to see whether or not it would work with the softmod. I use my xbox as my dvd player so I'm not really interested in parting with that part of the xbox anyway. As to the emergency situation recovery...I guess that's why I was the most tempted. Fortunately for myself I possess the skills to get out of that bad situation should it arise with the current setup.
I guess my primary interest in this is I understand that using a chip mod as opposed to a softmod frees up a little more memory. But I was really interested in just seeing what I was missing
What might be my favorite thing about the modded xboxes is the ability to play games without the disc. You install it once and that's it. I LOVE that. What's annoying is the separate F and G drives. One big partition would make it cleaner and just more manageable. If I make any changes at this point, it would be this. As to the streaming...yeah, that's my preference now, also. Not just for the space, but for the fact that I now have an Xbox in each TV in my home, and one copy of each movie is much easier than four. So, 32k cluster size. Got it. Thanks!

Hmmmm....I was afraid you'd say that. Oh, well. I currently have XBMC on my E:\dashboard directory. I'm going to see if there's room in C to just stuff it in there. If not then it's not a huge deal to me. Just looking to be more efficient.
I'm a butcher with a soldering iron.

From the way you make it sound, as well as other stuff I tried to read and didn't really absorb, this seems like more trouble than it's worth. Since my two best boxes are 1.6, it doesn't seem as if it's even possible anyway. Again, just looking to free up a little memory, as well as the space of not needing the M$ dash anymore. But, again, not a huge deal.
This is good advice, and since i'm happy for the most part, I'll take this advice...for the most part.

I'm always looking to do better though. And, I'm in for the long haul. When the 360 is cracked to this level I'll make upgrades, but it seems as if that's at least a year or two away, minimum...
Thanks so much for the responses gentlemen!