Gary, I'm glad you posted because I've been thinking about doing something similar to what you've ultimately ended up doing. So I guess Kiwidude kicked us both in the can.
I think I can do this with regex and a little luck. *fingers crossed*
Edited to add: Wow, so much easier than I thought. I don't even need to *use* regex, just set search and replace to regex and tell it which fields to use. That was so easy I'm wondering if I'm dreaming this.