Pain avoidance with Update Services ping problems

I hope I can save someone the trouble I’ve been going through related to post_meta and pings. If you are having trouble deleting or adding a “Custom Fields” key-value pair, you might want to check your settings in Options/Writing/Update Services.
Solution 1: Make damn sure you have a trailing slash on your URIs in the Update Services box. There is a slight bug in the functions.php code such that you must have a trailing slash on all your URIs. Or…
Solution 2: Modify wp-includes/functions.php in weblog_ping() around line 500 and add

if (!$path) {
$path = '/';
}

just before the call to xmlrpc_client. This way, if you don’t have a trailing slash on your URIs in Update Services, it won’t matter.
The nasty thing about this bug is that if you run into this bug, other things like deleting or adding a custom field won’t work because the xmlrpc routines do NOT gracefully handle the situation where there’s no path specified. Oy.
Hope this helps,
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