In my last post, I complained about an obscure Excel crash. Well, this morning the client got back to me saying that he opened up the original workbook (with no workarounds in place), and obviously, got the crash.
However, something was different this time. Dr. Watson showed him a link for more information, which he followed and found a download link for Office 2003 SP2! Released on September 27th! It fixed the issue! Less than a week after I lost a whole day debugging and working around it.
Thanks to Microsoft for monitoring the blogosphere closely and for being so responsive to my issue. Hopefully, the legion of call center workers on The Sub-Continent who refuse to escalate my other premier support case to anyone even remotely familiar with the Excel code base helped in churning out this incredibly timed hotfix.