A truly horrific problem to deal with; you have my sympathies. Good job finding a working fix under what must be a lot of stress. You do know ahead of time you'll have to wade through all the 'you should fix the underlying problem' messages?

The closest I've ever personally witnessed was a table where new columns were added at the end of each quarter postfixed with the quarter date on the names. It was a giant matrix of NULLs except a diagonal row along the at-the-time current quarter. You can imagine, I'm sure. It was rapidly (quarterly) approaching the 1024 column limit but with no fix in sight last I heard.