HDMI ports not working

[acme3dmax]

a friend of mine had this happen to him and i wanted to see if anyone else has had the same thing happen to them.

here is what he has:

samsung HDTV
Onkyo 606
ps3
digital cable box

he had everything hooked up by HDMI cables. one day he came home wanted to watch TV but he could not get any signal. he tried the ps3 and got nothing. he hooked up the cable box directly to the TV through HDMI and got nothing. same thing with the ps3. he hooked up the cable from the wall with coax with no box and got a signal. he got a replacement cable box and hooked it up directly to the TV through HDMI and that worked.

so from all that it looks like the HDMI ports in the ps3, cable box and at least the inputs to the onkyo are dead. i don't know much about onkyo but he was saying you can reassign the HDMI ports to different functions and he went through and reassigned and tested all the inputs and none of them worked.

has anyone heard of this before? seemed kind of strange problem to get. is there anything that can be done? he is going to check the warrenties but he could not remember if it had been over a year ago since he bought them. he said that he might get component cables and opical audio and use them.