Took the unit back to Best Buy and got another. I had the suspect DVD's with me and had the geeks there test them on the second player before I left. They ran no problem.
I did find this player to have issues with some DVD-R media. TDK's I made a couple of years ago would not play but the Verbatims (my standard media since then) played fine and they were made on the same Pioneer deck. My advice is to get the techs to test your unit prior to leaving the store to save you some time and agrivation.
For the $40 this thing costs they are probably not spending too much time on quality control IMHO. I also made that simple hack to set region code to 0 with no problem.