I was having a problem a few weeks ago, and without going into all the details, Microsoft sent me an email with permission to download the hotfix.
When I went to the place to download it, they said it had been replaced with a more recent version. I went to look at the newer one, and it said the same thing...there was a new hotfix that has replaced the one I was looking at. So I went to view it, and there was quite a lot of caveats about even using the hotfixes because they had not been completely debugged and I was essentially on my own if anything stopped working. Does anyone know anything about the reliability of the manually downloaded hotfixes (not the ones Microsoft advertises and recommends)? Is it smart to use one if it clearly hasn't been completely debugged? In my case, I got cold feet and decided to live with my problem for fear I would introduce addtional ones.