Well earlier I moved my Wii down to the widescreen downstairs, and Brawl with widescreen is awesome, so I'm keeping it down there for awhile.
About the HD with gray bars/no sound:
The gray bars appear on the top and bottom of the screen, not on the sides, so the picture resolution of HD channels is neither 4:3 nor 16:9. It appears letterboxed when it doesn't need to be. When the correct display (16:9, actual hi-def) without the gray bars is chosen, there's no audio. We had both the cable guy and a TV repairman at our house at two different times, both of them showing us cool things about HD. The TV repairman did something with the A/V cables that allowed our TV to utilize the surround sound rather than just the DVD player, though the DVD remote was required for volume control at all times. When he did this, there was actual audio for the HD channels in the correct display. The cable guy set the TV so that when it is flipped to an HD channel, it automatically set itself to the correct display without the gray bars, and back again when it's changed to a non-HD channel.
When one of the cats ran behind the television, a cable or two was pulled out (No LD we don't let the cats outside, as they could run away, we've had bad past experiences, we're not in Montana.), and we went back to the "wrong" display with the gray bars on the top and bottom of the screen with HD (To avoid this when I'm watching TV downstairs I just don't watch any of the HD channels), and none of us can remember for the life of us what went where to make the really good stuff happen again.
There are about 1,500 jacks in the back of the TV and 400 in the back of the DVD player, and a bunch of unplugged cables in the back of the set, and we're not going to go waste our time trying to figure out the correct combination.