I am pleased that you have found a way forward. I wanted to post earlier in this thread (but didn't in case it came across as a little glib) to say I have always found the Service dept. to be very helpful (although somewhat over stretched) on remedial work.
I hope you can also work something out on transporting your car. For what its worth, I've always worked on the basis that I/my dealer pay to get the car to MMC and they can pay to get it back to me. I don't know if this is standard policy - if it is, then it seems fairly sensible for MMC to split the cost with the customer and yet maintain some 'barrier' to discourage needless factory returns in cases where there are alternatives.
