Consumer Alert: Touch-control Lamps

Several years ago, HGTV told me my bedside lamps were wrong. They were too wide and too fat for my bedside tables (and I won't even mention they were brass). Yeah, I know HGTV is always telling me stuff. Like my kitchen needs updating as well as my floors and bathroom countertops. But I can't do everything they tell me. The lamps, however were do-able. I went online to Lamps Plus (and by golly they will never let me forget it!) and picked out two tall thin lamps. I found this picture on an old blog post because I can't go in there to take a picture because My Sweetie is asleep and I took the one out here apart.:
I really liked the lamps, but they were the touch-control type, which I wasn't crazy about and believe me, when you reach for a Kleenex at 4:30 a.m. and accidentally touch that thing, you are in for quite a shock. Anyway, one of them stopped responding to touch after a year or so, so I just ordered a third one. We took the "bad" one over to my FIL along with one of those rolling switches and he put it on the cord for us and then it worked. Now it was just on and off instead of the high/medium/low when it was a touch lamp. Not long after that, we thought another one had gone out but realized we had put the wrong bulb in it. So of course I wondered if that was what had happened to the first one. See, even though it goes high/medium/low, it does not work with a 3-way bulb.
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The one with the switch ended up on My Sweetie's side of the bed (the one in the picture at top) and the third one ended up in here by the computer. A few weeks ago, when I came in here one night, the lamp was unplugged. I asked him why the next day and he said the touch-control had gone out and it would not turn off. It's plugged into a surge protector, so I asked, "Why didn't you just flip the switch on the surge thing?" That's what we've been doing now for several weeks.
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Tonight when I came in here to turn on the lamp, the bulb popped. I unscrewed it and sure enough, it was a 3-way bulb. I had a good laugh and went to get a correct replacement bulb. But it didn't work. The touch part, I mean. The bulb worked, but there was no off or medium or low. Oh, well, I figured back to business as usual with the surge switch.
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Around midnight tonight I was finishing up my TV watching and noticed there was no light on here. I came in here to see what was what and smelled a melty plastic smell. I yanked the lamp cord out of the surge box and sure enough, it was the lamp. I removed the bottom of the lamp and this is what I saw:

That bumpy looking area on that little black box? That's melt. And here's what the top of that little black box looked like:

So the lesson here is if your touch-control stops working, either switch out the innards to a rolling switch cord or throw it away. It still smells bad in here and I sprayed the hell out of the room with Oust. Melty plastic plugged in things are never good.

~~3/17/09 UPDATE: Please GO HERE for more helpful information.