Hmmm, I remember having used that trick only once in my life, but the project has been administrated to dead (long story about clueless interns working as admins, dieing harddisks, missing monitoring systems, and insufficient backups). It was a crude class hierarchie that should have been refactored. At one point, the usual inheritance would have broken things if a certain method was overwritten. I don't remember the details and the sources are lost, but it was nasty and had a comment marking that trick as "evil but required".

Alexander