I find the EMB actually to be quite a reliable piece of machinery, at least in my couple years of flying it. The EEC's seem to fail a bit, but probably just due to their age. The flaps seem to give a few headaches, probably due to the hydraulic actuation, but other than a few control faults that have cleared, I've never had an issue with them. Have also had 2 deice timers fail on me. Terrain and GPWS issues seem to come up often, but will usually clear at power-down. Also the cargo and foward door indication systems seem to have frequent issues, microswitches probably get too much abuse just due to the sheer number of legs we fly each day. Other than that, great airplane in my opinion, seems to strand crews much less than the CRJ.