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FWIW, every time I've seen what looked like a major search engine ignoring rate-limits (either Crawl-Delay or webmaster tools settings) a check of the actual IPs being used showed that it was someone spoofing a well-known User-Agent, which left you needing some other form of rate-limiting either way.

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Very true, however the incidents I reference this was definitely not the case.

In fact for a while we would get Bing (MSN bot back then) crawl us everyday at the same time, almost on the dot.

Let me plug project honeypot (which I am in no way affiliated with). This is truly an awesome, and surprisingly accurate, free, service that does an amazing job at collecting heuristics on suspicious IP activity and exposing it in a easy to interpret way..

http://www.projecthoneypot.org/index.php

Project Honeypot is indeed great – I've been running their collectors for years on a few spare domains, racking up a fair number of harvesters.

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