Finally had a chance to do some gnumeric hacking last night and solved the XL crashing on exported macros problem. Released 1.2.6 (or at least did a tarball for release tonight) with that patch and a pile of fixes for labels in the charting engine.
Work continues in HEAD towards a fully gnome-optional build. We'll still use all the nifty toys if they are available (gnome-vfs, gconf etc) but we can scale back to gtk only if necessary for win32.