There was no earnings call this week from Dell, only a press release and an 8-K, both of which said the company still had to file its 10-K for Q2 and wouldn't have the 10-K for Q3 out by the deadline either. And the company said that it still didn't know the extent of any changes that might have to be made in this period or any other.

Five days after it was supposed to post its third-quarter numbers Dell got its act together enough to say that it earned $677 million, or 30 cents a share, six cents better than Wall Street had guessed, on revenues of $14.4 billion, up 3% from $13.9 billion. But these are only preliminary numbers and given the investigations going on down in Round Rock, they may have to be restated.

Last week it couldn't report because of the "level of complexity" it was facing due to the ongoing demands of both an internal and a now formal SEC investigation into its books. It is unclear what the investigations are really all about, but it's not backdating. Dell said they could show a material weakness in its internal controls over its financial reporting.

Despite the haze and the slow growth - overall unit growth slowed to 3% year-over-year - Dell's stock rose almost 9% in after-hours trading to $27 and it held through Wednesday.

A year ago Dell earned $606 million, or 25 cents a share, after a restructuring charge of $442 million.

The company offered no solid guidance for Q4, which will include an extra week, but cautioned that "improvements in growth and profitability may not be linear." Evidently both revenue and earning will be below seasonality.

Dell claimed in its press release that it achieved a "better balance of liquidity, profitability and growth" in Q3 driven by a better product mix worldwide. Meaning it's not selling its soul for a mess of pottage like last year. Its operating margin was 5.7%, up from 4.3% sequentially.

It said server revenues in the quarter were $1.5 billion, up 10% on 12% unit growth and storage revenues were $577 million. Gartner says Dell's gained a tad of share in servers at IBM's expense and is now up to 10.8% from 10.2% last year after having lost pride of place to HP in PCs.

Laptop revenues were $3.9 billion on 17% unit growth and desktop revenues were $4.7 billion on negative 5% unit growth, both segments influenced, Dell said, by its decision to focus on "more profitable products." Desktop revenues declined 9% year-over-year to represent 32% of income.

Revenues from software and peripherals were $2.3 billion. Enhanced services revenues were $1.4 billion.

Asia-Pacific and Japan contributed $1.9 billion in revenues on 29% unit growth, and Dell claimed a share point increase of 1.4%. China wasn't broken out but Dell claimed to be the fastest-growing vendor in the region with units up 33%. It said units in India were up 93%.

In EMEA, where it said it "took a more balanced approach to pricing," revenues came in at $3.3 billion with unit growth up 9%, and in the Americas, where it get its best margins, revenues were at $9.2 million on negative unit growth of 4% although unit growth in Brazil was up 37% and up 19% in Canada.

Support has been a sore point, and Dell has been spending $150 million on it trying to get it up to par.

It said that the average time a support customer is on hold had been cut from nine minutes to three and that it had cut call transfers by 30% and improved first-contact resolution by 20%.

The 8K said Dell's current financial issues have drawn an even dozen lawsuits.

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