Capacitor leaks are serious business. When a capacitor blows out, not only does the device in question die an instant death, it might even catch fire.

So when the New York Times reports on freshly unsealed documents from a lawsuit alleging that Dell, over the course of two years, sold almost 12 million Optiplex machines with leaky capacitors to companies large and small, you know there's pain ahead for Dell whether the company wins the suit or not.

The newly unsealed documents allegedly show that Dell was aware that capacitors from Japanese partsmaker Nichicon were almost certain to fail in the machines they were selling. But the company continued to sell these parts to everyone from Wal-Mart to Mayo Clinic, opting to focus on damage control rather than quality control.

At one point, 1,000 computers that Dell delivered to the law firm that was defending it in the suit started failing, and the computer maker allegedly "balked" at fixing them.

Even when Dell did get around to replacing faulty motherboards, a contractor that Dell hired to look into the issue found that Dell's replacements were themselves faulty. Dell apparently learned that Nichicon's capacitors caused problems in 97 percent of cases over a three-year period, and that the quality problems were ten times worse than the company had originally estimated.

Dell's attorneys admitted to the paper that there was a problem with Nichicon, "and it affected different customers in different ways." The company would not, however, comment on pending litigation.