The reason I never figured out the bug is that it took an absolutely enormous proprietary and secret input file to produce the problem. It would have been enormously difficult to locate and reproduce the problem since it's difficult to edit ASN.1 files by hand and it's even more difficult to get the right string of bits in the right order in the encoded file...

I was all set to try to figure it out right up until most of the telcos we work with approved the installation of activeperl on the related machines. It's been a couple years. If you changed most of the packer I betcha it would take a different input file to produce the problem — if it's even a problem anymore.