Al, we didn't have a large number of obsolete notes but I had no trouble with all of them except these few oddballs. If the note is not released I'm afraid you're stuck with either going to SAP or taking somewhat slippery path with tricking the system in debugger (from what I've read).
In our case though I believe SAP most likely just uploaded the note because they do have access to it, only we don't. So it's not that bad actually.
I guess we both just need to upgrade our systems more frequently. 