Which version of driver to use ?

Hi all,

We have a postgres 7.4 installation with production code running on it.
The code is written in Java and uses the JDBC driver to access it.

I recently discovered that the JDBC driver we were using is not properly
detecting connection problems in the pooled connection implementation to
report them to our connection pool. However, when giving a go to fix
this, I also discovered that the latest 8.0 driver fixes this problem
(I've checked the code).

So I've tried to upgrade to the 8.0 driver, but failed: our code is
pretty sloppy with the parameter types of prepared statements, and the
new driver is very strict about them. Eventually we will fix this, but
for the deployed code it's not an option.

Question: is there a way to make the 8.0 driver less strict ? E.g. we
have quite a few places where numeric fields are set with "setString",
and other things like this.

Alternatively, have anybody back-patched the connection error
notification fix to the 7.4 driver line ? If not, I could do that
myself, in this case what's the recommended way of getting the latest
7.4 sources ? Is there actually a CVS branch for it for bug-fixes ?

Thanks,
Csaba.