Door latch malfunction

After 3 years of light use, the door lock malfunctioned, which meant even at the end of the cooking/heating cycle, the oven would power on when you opened the door to get your food.

I e-mailed Panasonic about this, because having the power come on with the door open really freaked us out. They actually called me at home in response to my complaint (after 9 days, and the call was from some service person reading from a script.) I asked if there were known problems with the door latch and the Panasonic rep denied there was a problem, in general, with the door latches. No recalls. And the rep swore up and down (so to speak) no microwaves were emitted when the oven powers on with the door open (some sort of built-in safe guard kicks in, they told me.)

So why did they insist that I not continue to use it and get it fixed?? If no microwaves are emitted, and there is just this small annoying --and not dangerous--problem, why not continue using it and save the hassle of a repair?

The really funny thing was, they offered to pay for the diagnosis (which, we know is the door latch), but not for the repair. The repair was going to run about $75 to replace a $10 part. It involved me pulling it off the shelve, lugging it to the car, driving across town, and then repeating the same process when it unit was fixed. We paid about $160 for the unit when we bought it. So guess what? We're buying a new microwave, and it's not a Panasonic.

I like the inverter technology (GE also has it in one model so far), but a door latch should not break so easily. This is just another addition to the "they don't make 'em like they use to" list