P-171X FX Bios settings not saved after hard reboot?

Ok, my son spilled water on his P-171x FX (keyboard area, about 4oz.) last week. He quickly turned it off, removed the battery, hard drives. Dried it out for 4 hours. It started up, I had to reset the Bios, raid setup, but other than that no problems. Well now when he unplugs it without a battery and plugs it back in the Bios is back to default again, the date and time are still correct, so the cmos battery is ok I think. Also right when he plus on the power cord with no battery, his laptop powers on. I have a three year warranty in this with 6 months left, I called Gateway (after I figured out what the number is now). I told the Tech everything, he said it sounds like a hardware failure, gee really . I told me to fax in my sales receipt, I actually have it, any ways, we will see what happens. I have two 250gb set raid 0, it came with one 250gb, I hope I can take my hard drives out if they goto work on it. Also it came with Vista, I put Win 7, so I hope they don't give me the old "The OS has to be what came with it" BS. Anyways, sorry for the long ramble, does anyone have any ideas what could be the problem? I know the cause

 

Well no reply's, does anyone know what Gateway will do if they can't fix it under the extended warranty? Would I get my money back?