O.o

I actually just had the "WII SYSTEM FILES ARE CORRUPT" today. But I resetted my Wii and it began working perfectly fine again.

Weird.

Yeah I've sent it in twice doing that haha.  My wii runs silent and perfectly with no problems.  I put it through tons of use and I live in New Mexico where Dust is a huge problem.  

Did it happen after the wii system update?

I have to admit... although I feel exactly the same way, I don't understand why people are so precious of their gamesaves.

I mean sure for some games that you play often like Mario Kart.... but for say Twilight Princess I am not going to need the old save files anymore, as if I want to play again I will be starting from the beginning, and yet I would laboriously copy them to my SD card should my Wii fail.

Are you sure Nintendo won't be able to rescue your old save data? That stinks if they can't.

I agree, with current improved SD card support, there should be a feature to backup the whole shebang.

So... if your Wii dies and you loose all your downloaded games you're screwed?

You can't lose your downloaded games.... You can delete and re-download them as many times as you want on the same Wii console, so if your console is fixed but lost it's data you can re-download your games free (I think Nintendo does it for you anyway)

Or if Nintendo has to replace your console Nintendo can move your account to the new Wii.

Ah, thanks. That's very good. It's the only thing I was worried about if my Wii broke, don't really care too much about saves.

Naw. Your Wii Shop account is linked to your Wii's hardware address. Nintendo can just authorize the hardware address of your replacement Wii to have access to all the items you've downloaded from the Wii Shop. Your Wii would have to be pretty much completely destroyed (stolen?) for you to lose access to WiiWare and VC games.

Edit: I'm slow.

Reading through all these replies a couple of these things have happened to me. My Wii went for repairs shortly after i got Smash Bros. as it couldn't read the disc. It worked with Smash Bros. for a while afterwards but then gave up the ghost with it again. So i just used another Wii to play it. My Wii is very noisy now, though, especially when i am playing Animal crossing and on a few occasions has displayed a message saying it can't read the disc. Think it might be on the way out. I really should get round to formatting everything to an sd card. I do live in a "smoking house" though. Don't think the Wii likes being a passive smoker!