jammun,
Strangely, my Vista HCx was just replaced by Garmin. They don't worry about fixing your unit and sending it back. They just send out a replacement as soon as they receive your defective unit. Whether it will be a newly refurbished or new unit is up to Garmin. The entire process took about 10 days to ship-receive-send back. I upgraded the software to the current version and was back on the trail with no problems.
Very satisfied with their support.