Got off the phone with their manager (well, manager of tech support - phone help) and he said I should have gotten a slip of paper telling me that the very first thing they do to all computers is format the harddrive and reset it to factory default settings.
So yes, HP has a bunch of uneducated monkeys running their tech support department. If the format and reload does not work to solve the problem, the monkey is trained to bring the computer to a CompTIA certified computer repair technician, if they cannot fix the problem, it goes to a REAL computer technician!