A couple of more pics. The strings on the guitar were obviously pretty cheap and had a bit of corrosion, so while I was changing them, I decided to remove the pickguard and have a look underneath. The soldering/wiring looks pretty good, other than there being a lot of extra wire in there. Plenty of room for it in the cavity, though, so no big deal.
I thought I might find something amiss in there, because while position 2 is hum-cancelling, position 4 definitely is not. This strongly suggests that the factory swapped the positions of the bridge and middle pickups during installation. Measurement of the pickup impedances bears this out--the p'up currently in the neck position measures a bit higher than the other two, which agrees with description on the Guitar Fetish site. So I'll just swap those around and rewire the switch accordingly.
Scgmhawk reported that the tone controls on his XV870 had little effect above 4 or so, so I looked into that, while I was in there. The explanation is pretty straightforward--the pot tapers are swapped from what is generally used. The volume control is a linear taper, and the tone controls are both audio tapers, which is the opposite of what is typically used. This is what makes the tone pots so "one-sided" in their effect. However, this is a minor annoyance, so I'll change the pots around some other time. But it definitely looks like the Xaviere factory needs some remedial guitar electronics training.
The rosewood fretboard was very dry, so while I had the strings off, I cleaned and oiled that well. Looks a lot better now. The frets had some "factory crud" of some sort on them, and that cleaned up pretty well.
The only other minor defects I've found are that (1) the cut of the pickguard edge is a bit crude and needs to be trimmed/smoothed out in a few places, and (2) there are three small cracks in the finish between the electronics vacity and the neck pocket, but that's a common location for them, and it's covered by the pickguard anyway.
Don't want to create too negative of an impression with these small defects, however! None of these are serious, and GF/Xaviere seems to have gotten the big stuff right. The guitar plays well, the neck is nice, the p'ups have a nice, ringing vintage tone, and the overall fit and finish is much better than you'd expect from a $170 guitar. I have to play it a lot more to really give a more complete report on the guitar....
ancake: 
