While our situation was not as bad as yours, we too had a surprisingly
bad experience with a patch. Discretion prevents me from providing all
of the details, but our client heard that there existed one patch that
we did not have on our system, and that it's absence could be what was
affecting them. This came from a site that is on 50, and as far as I
know, has no support on their system. So, we asked our data center to
download the patch and stage it. And the process choked. I spent hours
on the phone, trying to get to the bottom of the problem or at least
find any alternate means of getting that patch on our system, rather
than wait for the tape to arrive. Days later, we were told that the
error we saw was due to having the wrong version of MOVER, which we
could have just downloaded.