Temporary Fix for not being able to set products as Child in Virtuemart.

I don't seem to able set my products up as Child or Parent in the way should because of an 'Error: Saving the attribute failed.'  Error message.  Here's the forum post for my problem,http://forum.virtuemart.net/index.php?topic=77402.0 its had over 500 views so I'm guessing I'm not the only person to have this error.

However I have got a bit of a work around to this.  The only thing that I'm really not happy with though is that all my child products ( ie all colour variations ) are listed in the category pages.  This is something I'll have to fix.

Here's what i'm doing though to get the products to look like this.

>> when editing you product go to 'Display Options' and in 'extra IDs'  and enter all the other Child product IDs here.

>> select the 'Use List box for child products '