has anyone besides me been having trouble with the locking tabs on the back of the unit breaking off and making it impossible to run down the lake with out the unit shutting off. I am curious if Hummingbird has came up with a fix for this problem

Do you mean locking tabs from the individual cables or the ones on a cable connector tray? If you are talking about individual cables, then you could get a cable connector tray from HB that would fix your problem. Or, if you are talking about the tabs on the cable connector tray, then you could just get rid of it and plug the cables directly into the unit.