Amazon claims to be processing the A-Z guarrantee and I got the promotional certificate without any fuss.
The two lessons I learned are: (1) Be wary of third party selllers on amazon.com and (2) pick up the phone and talk to a CSR. After my third round of e-mailing amazon support telling them that their canned/scripted responses to my queries were not acceptable or helpful, they stopped responding. I was hoping to see how long it would take to actually get a real human-generated e-mail response. Maybe, I'll never know.
On the other hand, the Indian woman on the phone that handled my A-Z request was very courteous and professional.