Thanks again, Jeff. What you are saying is music to my ears, since it gives me some hope I can drive my car the way it is. No, pulling the head is not an option, since I do not have the time to do it myself (it would take at least 3x the time than it should, going by my track record for such repairs) nor do I have the money to pay my indy to do it. I'd like to wait until I can do it right and have the head rebuilt at the same time. $2K is not in my budget right now.
So it seems the most likely failure mode would be a sudden increase in coolant loss. A second less likely possibility would be coolant getting into the oil or visa versa.
It really seems like this corner of the head was designed to be the first failure point. Below are two shots of the head from gsxr's website (thanks, Dave) that clearly show that corner and how it is sealed outside the normal head gasket by some sort of an o-ring. Also, it looks like there is one oil return passageway that is close but nothing else, and that is on the other side of normal gasket. So I've got my fingers crossed I will be able to drive it...with my eyes glued to the temp gauge...
