"Know Issue" not in KB. COLID continues to rise.

I use transactional replication on several very "wide" table. One has
254 columns. After finding that was my limit for replication to work I
removed an unused columns and added a new needed column. Since the
COLID in the SYSCOLUMNS did not reset replication failed. I'm down to
renaming columns now.
This was in SQL Server 2000 and is still present in 2005. A call to
Microsoft turned up "Known Issue" statement.
Has anyone found another way around this without creating a new table
with the needed columns and moving the current data in? Keep in mind I
inherited this database and did not create a table this wide.
Thanks.
Mike.Mike,
apart from your suggestion, the only other workaround I am aware of is to
partition the table and to replicate the 2 tables separately, which is
probably more work than your method.
Cheers,
Paul Ibison SQL Server MVP, www.replicationanswers.com