@Chip Cooper (Cyberchip)
Following your advice, I posted on StackExchange. Here's the post. Any help would be appreciated.
I want to make sure that it is a bug before I open a ticket: http://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/32932/blender-boolean-operators-problem

@Chip Cooper (Cyberchip)
Your comments are truly appreciated.
Please note that I did not post a question, but rather a bug (including an example, that I had boiled down to the essentials).
I do appreciate the developer's time, not least by keeping my posts short.
I read stackexchange quite heavily over the last few days.

@Chip Cooper (Cyberchip) . That's fantastic I'll make sure to look at it (spent 3 days on the bolt now...)

@Bastien Montagne (mont29)
Thank you very much for your time.
I added the file here. I don't understand what you mean by new report. Should I open a new ticket?
Much appreciated,
Ben

I think that this is a real issue. I've only been using blender for a couple of weeks. Three days on boolean operators that don't work. I looked at closing manifolds, reversing normals / making normals uniform. I aksi tried small translates to see if this would help (sometimes it did, but not in the attached case).