I had the Vizio for over a year (traded for Panny) and didn't experience anything like what you describe. My only beef was the dark shadow areas - was always "blotchy" and mottled (I think they call that false contouring). Otherewise, the set worked very well. I had read on the AVS forum (there were hundreds of pages on this set) that some Vizio owners were having various problems with things like fan noise and buzzing. I don't remember anyone complaining about image retention. BTW, the whole subject of image retention/burn-in is way overblown, IMHO. CRTs were always subject to this, but you didn't hear about it like you do with plasmas. Unless you're doing extreme things, like displaying static images for days on end, you'll likely never see burn-in.
