Considering that you were seeing unpredictable behavior in the boot selector, with it randomly freezing, I would assume a hardware component (RAM?) kicked the bucket. If it were firmware corruption, it would consistently fail to present the menu, or wouldn't boot at all.
Microsoft's code quality might not be at its peak right now, but blaming them for what's most likely a hardware fault isn't very productive IMO.
Microsoft's code quality might not be at its peak right now, but blaming them for what's most likely a hardware fault isn't very productive IMO.