Some annoying problems

I've had my HDTV about 6 months. I bought it on Ebay from 2ndAct. It is a refurbed unit but was warranted for 90 days by Philips and I bought an extended warranty. I have not had a service person out to look at it. The screen sometimes goes blue for now apparent reason for 10 to 20 seconds. The settings were causing the menus to "wiggle" and not work. My son who is a EE and actually designs HD chips made some resolution setting changes to stop the set from trying to send low res signals. That fixed the menu problem. The really annoying problem is the AVL(automatic volume leveler) just DOES NOT WORK. The support line at Philips was not help. They tried to tell me Direct TV does not send enough info in their signal for the AVL to be consistent. They wanted me to get cable... YUK! The other problem is the picture setting goes back to "soft" when the set is turned off not matter what you set it on after it comes on. It's supposed to remember the last setting... ???