The experience of dealing with Microsoft's support sounds exactly the same as what I had to deal with. In my situation there was no workaround possible short o

The experience of dealing with Microsoft's support sounds exactly the same as what I had to deal with. In my situation there was no workaround possible short of rebooting the system (it was a kernel resource leak), so after spending 3 months iterating through different ways to reproduce the problem (including "we don't support Windows on VMWare, after asking me to send them a VM image to reproduce the problem), going through 3 levels of support, I got to the people who were able to get me a fix. Alas, it was a private patch which was only available upon request, which didn't help much as I was working for an ISV.