I turned mine in to Apple for evaluation. I was told it was indeed affected by a bad nVidia chip, but was also told the serial number on the nVidia chip is out of range for their quality program.

The MBP chimes. The keyboard backlight activates. I can adjust the speaker volume. I can adjust the keyboard backlight brightness. I can eject optical disks.

I'm considering baking the BGA back into place. I have a small toaster oven. I have aluminum foil. I have a heat gun. I even have blue Fun-Tak for protecting certain parts (it was featured in an XBox 360 fix using a heat gun).

I'd love to know the best way to bake the board with respect to:

- proper equipment (kitchen over, heat gun, toaster oven, something else?)

- protecting the other parts on the logic board

- temperature and duration

- cooling procedure

Thanks for reading!

I can confirm Matthew's fix. It worked not only for the MacBook Pro featured in the original posting, but also for another MBP which exhibited similar symptoms.

The originally featured MBP actually failed to chime. I completely wrapped it in a quilt, let it sit upside-down, and played Halo for 1:45. I made a point to disturb the MBP as little as possible as I unwrapped the quilt. Yes, the underside was very hot. I let it cool down on its own. Afterwards, I was able to reset the PRAM (by holding down the power button) and was able to boot up the MBP. Subsequent sessions degraded the video. It went from working perfectly to displaying only the top third of the screen to completely reverting to its previous bad state. One more session in the hot quilt fixed that. The MBP behaves as expected, and the only quirk exhibits itself when the MBP runs without a battery - the Magsafe LED would blink sometimes or not activate at all. So far, I have been able to work around it by inserting a battery.

The second MBP also failed to chime, but I heard a fan, and wrapped it in the quilt (acrylic yarn), heated it up and let it cool naturally. It's essentially back to working order.