we had a camera reset it's our meter to 0000, from what should have been approx 200 hours. Any clue how such a thing could have happened? Not crucial to the use of the camera, but I don't like it when electronic things do unexplained things.

Welcome Nathan,
I don't have the answer off-hand. But the first item I would inspect would be the camera's back-up battery. Certainly that counter should be in some area of non-volatile memory and be unaffected by battery current. But <shrug> ya never know with version 1.0 of an electronic gizmo.

Yeah, that was all I could come up with so far as well......

Nathan, please check your camcorder if you did lost analog audio output and headphones volume in same time.
I had very similar situation, when my DVX100 reseted counter and same time lost analog audio out and headphones got high distortion.
Camcorder has to go for warranty repair by Panasonic.

I don't know if we had the same audio problems, but the camera is now having the entire deck bords replaced under warranty. That should fix it.