Actually it's kind of odd, but I had a situation where a desktop computer would have a very specific boot issue (as in, if you restart it, it hangs, but if you power down, wait 5s then power up, it boots fine). Over time as I upgraded it, I replaced the hard drive, the motherboard, the power supply, the video card, the cpu, the memory, and the case. The problem remained.
I know it's anecdotal, but the machine seemed to retain some core unwillingness to restart even though every piece of it had been replaced separately. I believe it was the same "broom" even though every component was different from the original.
Reminds me of the old gag: "I've had that broom for 14 years. It's only had 2 new heads and 3 new handles."
At least the server in the original story stayed original.