Epic Fail

Brought the Christmas tree up from the basement today.  It's a bugger of a big tree.  Bryan grumbled and groaned but didn't quite resort to swearing as he hauled that monster up the stairs and put it in its place in the corner of the living room.  I plugged it in and....

Voila!

Umm....
I knew it was going to have lighting issues.  We had lighting issues last year with more and more strings flickering out throughout the season before I finally pulled the thing down a few days earlier than planned out of disgust and frustration.  But I didn't realized it would be THIS bad!  One string?  Really?
BUT!  (And this is a really hopeful "but"....) 
This year I had a new handy-dandy lighting tool that was supposed to fix those lighting issues.  My brother-in-law swore up and down that it was the coolest gadget EVER (and this guy knows gadgets!)  The Light Keeper Pro.  Just pull out any bulb on a string of unlit lights, plug the tool in its place, click a few times and BAM!  Lights on.
Well....supposedly.
I think this is what you'd call an epic fail.

So the choices are these:

1. Strip the lights off the entire tree, buy 15 boxes of new lights and re-string the whole thing by hand.
2. Toss the thing and buy a whole new tree first thing tomorrow morning.
3. Toss the thing, bring up the smaller, downstairs tree and go more simple this year in tree decor.  (And then watch for killer clearance deals on trees after Christmas in preparation for next year...)

I think we are going with option 3.
How can something that brings such joy and contentment also cause such head-ache inducing frustration?