Most of the firms who've been left holding the bag by troubled tech companies don't want to talk about their woes, fearing it will scuttle what little chance they may have of collecting even a fraction of the money that they're due. "Whining to the press about how we got stung won't help our chances of getting paid back," says one architect who is owed a combined $700,000 by two downsizing dot-coms that hired his company to remodel their office space last year.

To be sure, such service providers are in a tough spot. While most landlords can move against a failed tenant's letter of credit or other security to collect at least a portion of what they're owed, architects, marketing firms and the like rarely have such fallbacks.

Suing isn't necessarily a viable alternative. Even if a firm is willing to incur the time and expense of going to court, the best many can hope for is to be placed in the same line as a slew of the failed dot-com's other creditors.

Creditors can sometimes recover some of the money they're owed by pursuing proceeds from the letter of credit the dot-com originally gave to the landlord, or by threatening to push the dot-com into involuntary bankruptcy, lawyers say.

"The downside to this strategy is that if the creditor received payment from the dot-com in the 90 days prior to the bankruptcy, the bankruptcy trustee could try to get the money back," says Jess Bressi, a partner in the Irvine office of attorneys Cox, Castle & Nicholson LLP. "Unless you're careful, you could wind up being forced to return any money you have recently collected."

Largely overlooked in all the media coverage of the tech wreck is the ripple effect it's having on the rest of the economy. UCLA economist Tom Lieser says that every Internet job that's lost costs another 1.5 to two jobs in related industries, from the law firms that helped take companies public to the waiters who served Web designers $4-a-cup, double coffee lattes.