we still have serious problems with the 100mW laser head. I traced it down to the connection between the PCB and the hermetically sealed optical part. There is a really loose connection somewhere. The connector seems to be OK, the PCB and all solder points are OK too (visually). But if you slightly touch the PCB you can see the yellow LED flickering, if you touch it a bit more the laser goes off and on. This happens too if you touch the D-SUB cable on the back. I added some little stress to the PCB when putting the thing back together, now the situation seems to be better, but is far away from being gone. In order to get started we are using it now as long as we can and think about a solution in the meantime. One option would be to fix the busted NPRO Peter has. This would probably take about a week or so. We have to align the laser diode and focusing lens and solder (!)  the focusing lens in place. The problem is that you can't align in vertical direction, so you have to remove the laser diode, put some more or less indium foil below and start again from zero. But it's an option. Peter had it already back to 550mW (out of 700mW) or so (for a couple of minutes, simply holding all parts in place. So the difficult part is to keep it permanent in the right place...