Well, contrary to the news on Major Nelson’s podcast, Microsoft has not fixed the Xbox Live woes. It appears that there is a lot more work to do!
The service today (last 8+ hours) is unreliable to completely shotty when trying to play/matchmake Halo 3 or COD 4. Another insidious aspect is that the Xbox Live sign-on servers are not able to meet current demands. As a result, numerous subscribers are unable to recover their gamertags. However, the process does work, just enough, to invalidate your current gamertag location. The bottom line is that if you try, or have tried to recover your gamertag in the last 8 hours, your holiday (MLK) gameplay with Xbox Live is ruined.
Logging a support incident is futile for resolution. The service is broken, and those on the front-line phones are impotent to do anything other than make you jump through unnecessary hoops. BTW: Does perform maintenance do anything? The support representative had me enter X, X, left-bumper, right-bumper, X, X to open up the perform maintenance blade while looking at the hard-drive ‘Y’ options menu. (The place where you rename or format the device)