So before I went underway our car had developed a trouble causing the Check Engine light to come in continuously. No abnormal sounds but being nuclear-trained has taught me not to live with “locked-in” alarms or warnings. I wasn’t able to troubleshoot it in the limited time I had before deploying so I asked my wife to make sure it got investigated when she had free time.
She took the car to the dealership. She actually had to make two trips; apparently there were two separate faults that would have caused the light to come in by this time. Nothing mechanical luckily, but apparently at some point while the dealership was troubleshooting the issue they had to unhook the battery. Doing this activated the anti-theft feature of my radio; it would not play music unless I typed in the anti-theft code. This code was included on a card which I was supposed to remove from the car and keep in a safe place. Needless to say, I had removed it from the car, and it is still in some safe place, nowhere to be found.
So my car radio has been silent for about a month and a half now. I finally got the time to really dig into this issue since the dealership apparently is completely unable to figure out what the unlock code should be. A little browsing on the Internet and apparently many people have had the same issue, and the unlock codes are few enough to list in one paragraph.
So I went and wrote them down and typed them in one by one. After about a dozen tries the radio started working again. Yay! I will record the code in my KWallet this time; it is the only thing which I reliably can count on being there. In case anyone else develops this issue with a Chevy Aveo, I found these posts helpful: automotive forums and Yahoo! Answers.