I have started a MS Support call on this issue but i thought i would post it to the forum at the same time to see if anyone else has experienced a similar issue (and i will update with the results of the support call):
the symptoms of this issue are:
I have existing columns in multiple site collections are of type "managed metadata".
if you open up a document (in office 2010 or office 2013) of content type A which contains one of these columns, and try to update the column value in the document information panel, the following occurs,
it looks like the value has changed, you save the document.
when you open up sharepoint from the web browser and look at the properties of the document, the values do not change. If you reopen the document from office, the value it shows in the document information panel is the changed value (which does not get propagated to sharepoint).
If i go to a completely different machine open up a document that i have changed the value in office, when i open up the document in office it will show the changed value however if i look at it in the sharepoint GUI it will show the original value...
Running a fiddler trace is see some errors like this
POST
http://hub/lrc/landuse/sub/_vti_bin/cellstorage.svc/CellStorageService
400 Bad Request ()
POST http://hub/lrc/landuse/sub/_vti_bin/workflow.asmx
500 Internal Server Error (text/xml)
in the sharepoint logs i do get some errors like
Unable to open Lookup list '{7afe42cd-b22a-49d2-82fd-f57e5e6f74be}'.[Error was 0x81020026]
with the support engineer yesterday we noted that if we made a new column using the same termset as the old column everything worked perfectly, it was only for existing columns that we have this problem.
for the record here are the CU's that i ran after which i got into this bad state...
Feb 2012
Apr 2012
Aug2012
Oct 2012
these all ran successfully. Now i know that MS says that CU are well cumulative. But we did some testing and found that they were not indeed so that is why we ran each one to be sure we had all of the updates (we were a little behind). My bad i actually missed running the jun 2012 CU.
krd