When I bought mine at the beginning of '07, I compared the ZVM to the Zune and iPods out there to see which would be most flexible for playback options (i.e. which let me use the most formats) and this won hands down. It also had better battery life for video playback, better sound and picture quality than the iPod.
I have to say I am still feeling the love for this player, I use it daily. I paid twice as much for it new and it was still worth it. 
The only thing I wish is that I’d gotten the 60GB version at the time because my 30GB ZVM’s memory is slam-packed full and I have to keep pulling video files off to get new ones on there.
I highly recommend the epizenter boards for anyone that purchases one of these since they have probably answered pretty much any question you’ll run into as well as giving tips and tricks that aren’t covered in the owners manual and additional goodies like reviews of cases and skins, hard drive and battery mods (if you’re not afraid of getting into the guts of your player) and more. The one thing I will warn folks of is that there’s a lot of whining over there, especially about iPods. It’s mainly the normal whining that goes on with any board that’s been around for a while and the whole minority fighting the good fight against the iPod tidal wave thing going on. Just skip those threads.
http://www.epizenter.net/news.php
The other recommendation I have is that if you find you do need to convert a video file to play it, don’t use the included software. Go find a copy of Super online, it’ll give you many more options and is much quicker.
Most of the issues I’ve heard of for returned ZVM’s is if they’re DOA. A lot of people do not realize that the unit will not power on as soon as you plug it into the USB port, it does need to charge for a few hours first. Do yourself a favor and go get a cheap power cord that plugs into a regular wall outlet on eBay for a couple of bucks, you’ll have the thing fully charged in a couple of hours, it’s much faster. The other advantage of cheap eBay cords is that you can buy ones that will fit right into the player. The Creative cords will require you to add the included dongle to the bottom of the player to allow you to plug in multiple connectors at once, but the cheap cords will let you choose if you want to carry just the cord which will fit the entire bottom opening instead, eliminating one thing to carry around.
The other reason these items may be showing up as re****furb is that this player has been discontinued. Creative is switching to all flash-based memory players (the new Zen was just announced/released with 32GB flash memory, but for $300+).
Final word of warning, a lot of the accessories look like they use the same plug that will fit iPods and so people sometimes use iPod accessories on the ZVM. This will usually fry the ZVM, so don’t plug this into your iPod speakers, etc.
I think that’s about it for now…so go buy one!
