first of all, thanks for all the replies! i am currently moving on the the same pace as i was before the exam, so still working hard to get myself prepared for a retake of the exam (which is the reason i am not that active here right now).

i can relate to all the comments posted, especially the try harder slogan. i just want to point out one thing, and that is that the whole essence of the course is to learn. and i get the feeling that they sometime forget that people start this course to do so, and may have slim to no prior knowledge to lean on. from this point of view it would be at least "humane" to provide the knowledge needed. i understand that it should not be handed on a silver platter, but some form of help (in the form of hints/pointers, or even the complete answer for people who just want to know) would be greatly appreciated. i think it is doable to provide an exam that filter outs the "cheaters" and keep the level of quality it has now.

Anyway like stated before, i am not even thinking about giving up. i am working as hard as possible to pass the exam, but like Hayabusa said, family comes first (and they have put up a lot since the start of the course, believe me). I have already made some pretty good progress, so i hope to finish this one before the start of 2011.

Great advice apollo.

Have been meaning to ping you off forum (send you a personal message).  Want to get an idea from you on how the OSCE went, etc, as it's on my 'to-do' list, now.

I'll ping you when opportunity permits (or feel free to PM me on here, too, if you have thoughts for me, in advance.)

How about perfect score ? Do you think this course needs experience in order to achieve perfect score?

Your OSCP writeup was detailed and gave a very clear idea. Looking forward to your OSCE review, if you plan on giving one..

I'm working on the OSCE writeup right now.  I hope to have it done within the next week or so.  It was a heck of a course.

I got all the boxes on the OSCP.  To get a perfect score, from my experience, you need to understand everything you did from the course well enough that you are only going back to reference commands and not techniques.  I did not get all of the "extra" boxes that you discover in the lab that aren't part of the normal IP range.  If anyone gets all those let me know the next conference we're at together cause you deserve a frosty beverage of your choice.  The OSCP makes you think a little beyond the class, so if you just follow the steps you'll find what you need to do, and then the extra thought comes from the actual execution.  The OSCE is the same way.  Figuring out what to do is fairly straight forward, figuring out how to do it is where you have to take what you've done in the labs to the next level.  

I am not a professional pen tester.  I do some of it as part of my job, but I spend probably about 5% of my time doing pen test related things.  My background is in unix sysadmin and security, and I have taken a pen testing class before but nothing as thorough as the OSCP.  I finished the OSCP in about 8 hours with all but one box popped by hour 5.  The last 3 hours were all spent on the one box i had left with half an hour of World of Warcraft stuck in between.  The 30 mins of WoW were what made all the difference as after I took a break I figured out what to do next pretty quickly.

So .. if I didn't say it before.. in both the OSCP and OSCE breaks made all the difference.  I actually took a few hour nap in OSCE and it made a huge difference.    

Ok, last tidbit of stuff that helped me.  When looking for exploits, whether remote code execution, privilege escalation, or whatever almost everything you need is going to be on the bt4 cd.  The search script through the archives is nice, but it made me spend way more time than I needed in most cases.  Frequently grep got me exactly what I needed cause some people have stuff in the code that is really helpful.  For instance, if you have shell on a RedHat 6.0 box and you are looking for privilege escalation for that, just try 'grep -ri "Redhat 6.0" platforms | grep local' .  From there you can figure out what each thing does.  If you've tried other stuff and it didn't work, that really helped me.

Good luck!  The fact that you have gotten this far and are still going means you will get it, it's just a matter of a little more practice.  If you have areas where you feel you are weak, let us know and we can maybe make some more recommendations.  

I still wanna talk with some folks to come up with some good test builds for vms to use for pen-testing practice.  If folks are interested in working on this with me, drop me an email or PM.  I typically do most of my demos with XP SP0, but am eager to add some other vms to my standard arsenal.

I did v2.  I haven't seen the content for v3 so no idea on the comparison. 

I will look back at my leo files, but I don't think I used any sploits off the web.  I think everything I used was milw0rm or exploitdb.

so i got my OSCP at last great course fun and the learning curve is amazing
whats the possibility of finding pentest jobs using OSCP ?

middle east but i was actually wondering if i can get a job outside my area

Good kee going.