Anyone ever come across a Locked TPM?

I was wondering about it, cos I haven't seen this since the early 2000's when Lenovo took over IBM... Lenovo was the first I ever saw to put Biometric scanners in Laptops. IN 2003 or 2004, I came across a laptop that had something LIKE TPM in it, or maybe it was one of the first - The Whole motherboard had been locked out with a password that nobody knew.

Since back then, the only way to fix it, was to pay a guy in Australia a thousand bucks for a Breadboard Kit that you could stick the Chip on to change (but not remove) the password - The only advice I could give the guy who had bought the system for significant cash, was to pour gasoline on it and see if it melted: That or PAY the 1,000 bucks US and buy the breadboard kit! Because, back then, not even Lenovo could break into a password protected BIOS and Motherboard.

So, today I get this Dell Optiplex 780 to work on and it has - Guess what? TPM! And it looks like the same tech. Apparently, the system *had* been protected, but there was some kind of Master password Reset.

So the question is, with these new TPM'med machines, can the security be overridden if it had been set but never shut off before the systems were sold at Auction?

I'm asking cos I have a Gigabyte MB here waiting for me to build it into a nice Core Duo System, but it has TPM on it, and knowing the guy I got it from, he probably set it then forgot about it, so now it's probably locked. I hope it is not, but just in case it is, is there a way to release the TPM?