LiPo's discharge very rapidly when they are connected to a low resistance sink.

This puts them over their thermal limits causing the polymer material to break down... you normally get a lot of heat out of the packs, and you'll notice a slight "puffyness" to the packs.

If the packs look like they did when you got them, with no new puffyness or squishyness, they should be OK.

The ESC is a pre-wired 10A brushed ESC.

See: [link=http://www.nitroplanes.com/guanlibrushesc.html]Click me for ESC[/link]

The motor is a fairly common Mibushi ( sp? ) type can brushed motor, used in many devices and commonly available.

[link=http://www.nitroplanes.com/guanlimotor.html]Motor click me![/link]

Guan Li is the vendor, but not the manufacturer of the motor.

In your shoes, since I would be looking at purchasing a replacement ESC anyway, I would look for a LiPo compatible brushed 10-20A ESC that I can use.

However this requires doing a bit of rewiring and is not as convenient as one of the drop-in replacements.

Of course you can go nuts in the other direction ( which I often do ) and opt for dual brushless motors with dual brushless ESC's but this would cost more to do than what you paid for the plane.