Yes the new system is over half the reason why I don't use Ebay at all. IMO the new system and Paypal help the scammers and screw the honest people.
I can understand that, but I have had pretty good luck with mixing Craigslist, Ebay and usually Newegg. You can never find deals on used power supplies, and rarely on used memory, so that I get from Newegg. Video Cards are much cheaper used. If you don't need a $500 video card to get a few more FPS, I look for a bit and find a GTX 460 or 550ti for $50-60, that's about 1/2 what you'd pay for a comparable new 550/560/650 (I like NVidia).
I picked up a 9600 GT for one of the computers I am building for my father, plenty enough for him, for about $17 shipped, comparable to a 630 which runs $70+ new.
Motherboards, I am rethinking. I paid $30 for this used, but for 20 more I could have gotten this well reviewed, better board, new. Not high end, but solid
GIGABYTE GA-78LMT-S2P Micro ATX AMD Motherboard - Newegg.com
Hard drives are good used. I had been getting lots of 80Gig SATA drives for the OS and whatever larger drive for storage. I used to use 40 gig IDE drives for win XP, I now have a lot of extra IDE drives around.
But anyway, thanks for all your thoughts. The seller did refund my money, and I will give him positive feed back for that. I think he may have had a bad day when he shipped it. I know he read this thread and probably won't ship like that again.
Thanks,
Brad