In this post, and in a prior post that I can't dig up right now, I complained about a bug in VB.NET 2003 where the system would generate dozens of errors in the task list, even though the project was fine. The only way around the problem was to do a complete rebuild of the app, and that cost us many minutes every time we ran into it.
Well, Paul Vick pointed me in the right direction. There is a hotfix available! The KB document is here. After having to go through roughly 8,000 steps to get a trouble ticket opened with MS, including paying for the support, I got the hotfix and it worked. Naturally, since this was a 'known issue', MS refunded the money, but it is frustrating that you can't just say 'Hey, your own guy told me this is what I need, now gimme!'. Oh well, I guess when you're as big as MS, procedure and policy are triumphant at all times.
So thanks Paul and his team who figured out where I needed to go, but my question is: Why didn't these show up in the IDE when I searched for downloads? I hope VS.NET 2005 is better at this sort of thing.
Oh yeah, I did try to find this resolution in the KB on my own at earlier times, but apparently the key was to look for 100k, not the error messages that we were receiving.