Tivo hosed me on a version of item 2 a while back. My Tivo account is ancient, and when I created it the old email+gibberish@gmail.com trick worked fine. A year or so ago they released a new version of their site that wouldn't accept that email as valid. I was eventually able to sort it out but it required escalating the request several times as apparently even CSR tools couldn't handle the + in my old email and they were also unable to interact with the account. Good times.