AC cord polarity?? Does it matter???????

Jeff's explanation is correct, except that cheater plugs now only come polarized (one wide blade) so if you want to use them as he describes, you'll have to file down the wide blade so it wil go into the socket either way.

Of course if you decide to use a balanced power unit, all this is of no concern.

Jea, a 240V line is inherently "balanced". Its ground and neutral are the same (center) conductor, with a potential of +120v on one side and -120V on the other (which reverses every 60 sec. of course.) BTW, I don't believe European 240V power is configured this way (at the outlet), but somebody correct me if this is wrong.

Now to get balanced 120V is a whole 'nuther matter. First you get a great big toroidal transformer and feed it 120V +/_ into one tap and zero volts (neutral) into the other. In a second, identical winding, you take the power out at 60V +/_ tap and 60V -/+ tap and feed one to each blade of the AC plug. To keep the drama queens at U/L happy, you create an artificial ground/neutral for the center ground pin of the plug/receptacle. This is done through some kind of circuitry which U/L is willing to certify provides shock protection ;~)) but it's not an "earth" ground.

If your equipment circuit designer or assembler has been less than attentive as you postulate, then balanced power will save his/her ass because both primary leads are being fed equal (60V) voltage in a "push-pull" arrangement around (or across) an "imaginary" ground (rather than the normal zero volts in one lead and plus-or-minus 120V in the other.) So in the balanced-power-fed component, circuit polarity relative to ground disappears along with any polarity mismatches in the wiring.

Metro04, you are correct in your basic evaluation of the situation, but yes, you are missing something, and that's the damn power company!

As the article Jea48 mentioned above illustrates, the power company uses (literally) the ground for its return leg to the generator. Which means in normal 120V house systems, the neutral blade is not always at zero potential relative to ground (in fact I've never found it to be so.)

So it's not the component's fault exactly, but depending how a components (power supply) circuits happen to be oriented to this "ground leak" current will mean slightly more or less noise (usually 60 cycle hum) in your system.

Balanced power units simply eliminate this problem altogether.

Metro, the answer to:

"In most homes, aren't the neutral and "ground" combined within the breaker box?"

Is no. And this is very important to understanding the "leakage" problem oulined in the article you cite above.
The neutral is zero relative to the 120V on each side of it. But it is not zero relative to earth ground.

So depending how the power supply in a component is laid out, connecting one of the two AC plug blades to neutral will result in less ground current leakage through the "neutral" leg of the power supply circuit. As a matter of fact, that is why, as someone described above how to measure for the best plug orientation, they specifically mentioned not to connect the ground pin of the AC plug when doing the measurement. To which I'll add two more rules: turn off the component, and disconnect all other connections to the component (ICs, spkr cables, coax cable or digital feeds, etc) because they may be connected to ground somewhere on their other ends, and you don't want that.

The idea behind this testing procedure is to "force" current that would,in grounded components, ordinarily drain to ground, instead to "leak" through the neutral so it can be measured. And then minimized by choosing the proper plug orientation.

So why is doing this a good thing? Because when everything is hooked back up, some current will drain to ground through the ground leg, and every one of these conditions in your system represents a ground loop which increases the baseline level of hum (and sometimes noise) in the system.