Waited to hear the actual fix before calling it free. Free means the part cost nothing, sure, but 14 hours of your time is not free. If you make 25 bucks an hour, that call cost you 350 dollars in lost time, and that is before you count the stuff you put off while you were buried in it. A lot of people make this mistake, they see zero dollars on the receipt and call the whole thing a win. The real question is whether that 14 hour rabbit hole could have been cut down with a 10 dollar part or a 5 minute call to support. Sometimes the cheap fix is the slow one and the paid fix is the fast one, and the paid one still wins.