Dell, Inc. (NASDAQ: DELL) released Q2 financial this afternoon after the market closed. As I indicated yesterday, this Q2 period was probably one of the more highly anticipated earnings releases from the computer maker in quite a while. Just a few weeks ago, the company concluded its own internal financial investigation into possible financial shenanigans and the results included over $150 million in quarterly restatements stemming back to 2002. The official SEC investigation is not through yet. If you want details on the Q2 results before the webcast with Dell executives begins, here you go.

Dell's Q2 conference call will most likely shed some light on the fight the computer maker has had since January of this year to try and catch up to larger rival Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE: HPQ), which reported a touch under $25 billion in revenues for its latest quarter.

Has Dell seen increased shipments of PCs with its newer and colorful laptop systems? Is the Wal-Mart retail relationship going well for the company? These questions and many more are on tap here in a few minutes once the analysts dig in with questions.

Analyst expectations were for Dell to report an earnings figure of 30 cents per share on revenue of $14.63 billion. It will be interesting to see if any analyst questions come up about this week's acquisition of smaller PC rival Gateway, Inc. (NYSE: GTW) by Taiwan's Acer. Stay tuned by using the "Refresh" button on your web browser to see all the minute-by-minute updates below. All times are in CST.

Dell, Inc. (NASDAQ: DELL) CFO Don Carty sounded pretty confident last week that the accounting fraud inside the computer company, which resulted in a restatement of earnings from 2003 to 2006, was being cleaned up. But there are still many questions left unanswered including figuring out how much company founder Michael Dell knew about these shenanigans that occurred while his hand-picked buddy Kevin Rollins was chief executive.

Mr. Dell's role at the company he founded during the time of all these accounting problems will be under close scrutiny as the official SEC investigation continues, now that Dell's internal investigation has been completed. Did he know that revenue recognition was being shifted around in order for every quarter to meet (or beat) market expectations?

As Chairman, Mr. Dell probably had no idea what was going on and trusted Rollins' command of the day-to-day operations of the company. But in the last few months, this arrangement clearly wasn't working well.

Dell lost its CFO in the last eight months and the role was replaced. Then, Rollins was let go. Was this because of shoddy performance or financial shiftiness? Probably a little bit of both for Rollins. But with Dell still struggling to better compete against a resurgent Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE: HPQ) and others.

Financial scandals aside, Mr. Dell has quite a bit of work on his hands to convince Wall Street the company now is on the right path.

As Georges Yared wrote this morning, Dell Inc.'s (NASDAQ: DELL) accounting irregularities are the least of its problems these days, but perhaps they are at the root of the company's problems. It seems that Dell is in a fully-mired slump on almost all fronts right now: its shares are stagnant (and have been for a while), its sales are down while competitor HP is growing, many of the exec staff has left recently (and much new blood has arrived), and the company has now found possible mischievous actions within its finance controls department. What a mess.

So, regarding the accounting mess currently underway in Round Rock, the company has delayed filing its latest 10-K with the SEC while it digs into further dirt piles within is accounting and financial areas to see just what the heck is going on in there. The "evidence of misconduct" sounds like old hat these days: someone (or more than one) in accounting is cooking the books somehow. Possibilities are abundant: Did someone inflate revenue by accounting for sales before they occurred? Did someone decide to toss GAAP aside while trying to make Dell meet quarterly numbers?

Are you a Dell shareholder? If so, your voice should be loud and clear here: things need to start making a turnaround and pretty quickly. It's true that Sarbanes-Oxley has been a resource hog for many companies recently (it almost has to be by definition), but at Dell, I guess it wasn't on the list of priorities as irregularities were hidden, buried and stashed in an oil furnace somewhere. Shareholders deserve more, and so does the share price which almost doesn't deserve to be where it is until things are cleaned up.

DELL shares just opened down nearly 2% to $22.93.