From what I've seen on boards and Bugzilla, this isn't too common at all. You might just have bad luck with getting bad units.

What applications did you load? That should help other users be of help. I'm a pre-n00b myself (I haven't gotten one yet! Just ordered), so I'm not of much help. If you want more serious help, you can file a report in the bugs section and vote it up, but it's likely it will be filed "worksforme".