Ok here is the tale.

Preordered Halo 3 standard edition and picked it up on launch day.
Took it home.
Played until the part where you board a pelican and get to a cut scene after
downing some wraiths.

Dirty disk error.

I checked the disk and it looked pristine.

So I returned it and got another disk.

Same issue.

The only game I have that ever does this is GOW every once in a while and it
certainly is scratched, so I expect it.

After four calls to support and endless net searching I found that:

many others with SE are having this issue.
They all report the same kinds of experiences I have.
We have all done all the tech support fixes.
Some have even gone rrod after playing the game.

I have simultaneously ordered a new 360 off geeks, which has a good sale
right now and have entered a repair ticket to MS for the price of 100
dollars flat rate to fix it. And however long they need to fiddle with it.

I firmly believe that there is a firmware issue in some of the DVD rom
players that is causing this.

I called MS and tried to find out if there was a way to report a suspected
issue.

THERE IS NONE.
There is no official channel to send a written request, there is no person
to talk to , there is now web form, NOTHING.
They either recognize it as an issue or they do not. Lord knows how they
find the issues to put them in their databases.

I would also guess that they are deliberately doing this so that there is
not such a huge pall over the whole launch.
Scratched disks because of a bad packaging machine are one thing, but
thousands of users being unable to play and being told to send their Xboxes
in for out of warranty repairs for an error in the software or firmware is
something else.

Even the email address that one support person at MS gave me
h2cheats@microsoft.com bounced back as an unknown address.

I am very disappointed in MS for the way they have handled these issues and
their inability to service their customers on an individual level like other
companies do.
I am not saying they should pee all over themselves to help me out, but a
web based system for logging a ticket and then being able to check its
status and follow up on it seems like a reasonable request.

It comes down to how much profit can they squeeze out of the support
contract they have with Bungee.