Via Mini ITX BIOS corruption

There’s nothing more that I hate than losing perfectly good hardware due to buggy software. This is just what has happened the last couple of days as I attempted a BIOS update on my Via Mini ITX CN10000 system. After downloading the BIOS flasher (VIAFLASH_V09_Beta_Release090307.zip) and the new BIOS BIN file, I set to flashing the BIOS - as you would any other. Until everything stopped.

That’s right, this BIOS updater seems buggy as all hell - as after a quick search on the ViaArena forums there have been many people who have killed their Mini ITX systems using this BIOS update tool - Some of these many months old. This leads to the question, if so many people have killed their mainboard with this bios update tool, why are Via still offering it as the ONLY way to flash the BIOS of their systems via DOS? Surely after so many people kill their system, they would change the flashing program to a non-buggy one?

Lucky, in my position, I have access to a friends PLCC programmer so it may be possible to recover the BIOS on this system - however if that wasn’t the case, I’d be looking for another $280 mainboard. Not a good solution :