Actually I have managed to seperate myself from most of the grubby stuff by putting my routines into their own module(s). I've been pushing my employer pretty hard to let me reimplement a lot of this stuff (even so far as to replace all these hacked database (read flat text files) to real databases), yet right now the reality is I have to deal with all the corporate overhead... beauracracy and all... I've had implied to me that fixing these things would be a bad idea (lots of reimplementation???) but more than likely it is somebody wanting to be lazy.
For now I'm just trying to get one thing fixed at a time... however there is no reason to *not* be paranoid. I have had a few too many problems in the last year with people changing code bases under me without warning to not be worried and as such raise it as a concern.
Having people rely on your code and when it breaks not knowing where the problem is just stinks. Especially when you had nothing to do with the breaking.
