Heh, not the same corporate snafu, but my most expensive work was done to change 1 char.
Spent about 3 weeks with a new codebase to find that one number had to be increased. Funny thing is, there was a comment there and somebody had increased it before when they had a similar problem.
I've found that bugs that are very hard to debug often have the smallest fixes. Once you've discovered what tidbit of information you were missing, the fix is trivial. I guess this is a needle/haystack problem.
Spent about 3 weeks with a new codebase to find that one number had to be increased. Funny thing is, there was a comment there and somebody had increased it before when they had a similar problem.