If you followed through the links in my previous post, you read about Vibro (if you didn't, you missed some funny stuff), but you may not have read this in the comments:

I once met Denny O'Neil at a convention and he told me that he wasn't really interested in creating villains so much as exploring Tony Stark's alcoholism, so Mark Gruenwald (the series' then editor) would come up with characters like Vibro.

I just read through a huge stack of Denny O'Neil Iron Mans, and they definitely read like that -- here's some interesting and serious stuff about Stark's alcoholism, here's some interesting stuff about Rhodey learning to be Iron Man, and oh, i guess we'd better throw in some lame villain, too. I thought it was just O'Neil bowing to comic book convention. Now that i know it was Mark Gruenweld, king of cheese, forcing those characters on O'Neil it makes even more sense. The saddest part you can tell from the previous issue's teaser and that blurb on the cover that he was really excited about this new character he'd come up, like he'd created the next Magneto or something.