Stever:

Exactly. I went over to troubleshoot a non-firing computer this last weekend for a person who said that they were working on the computer and suddenly there was a pop, closely followed by smoke and then computer death. Don't know for sure WHAT caused it, but they just moved into a house in the sticks and had plugged their computer into a crap power strip.

I opened up the power supply and it had a capacitor blown clear off and bits of charred electronics inside. Luckily for them it didn't affect the rest of the system and power supplies are cheap, because it easily could have gone out from the power supply to their hard drive and motherboard, and from there.... .

Spend a little money and replace that power strip with something that has some protection to it. $30-40 and you'll save yourself much more in not having to replace a toasted switch, cable modem, whatever else you have plugged in there. If you want pictures of that toasted power supply for motivation I've got it in the car still.