Merge Official master branch (12/9/2014)

I'm putting this out there in case anyone has any thoughts or concerns. I only **really** want the last commit, as I requested it. However, we could cherry-pick.

**However** this will be marked as Do Not Merge because version 2.6 introduced some changes in how the object hashtables are seeded, using random numbers. Without a change in the xl repository, this will cause cppunit to be non-deterministic and fail often.

I have a hack for xl, but I'd like to think of a better solution.