excel output can't be sorted when components is a column

I am accustomed to exporting my issue list to Excel and then re-ordering the columns as I wanted them within Excel. Due to the bug JRA-7454, I cannot get JIRA to sort it for me. Frustrating as anything - that one is – I hope it's really fixed in 3.3.

Anyway, within Excel I used to be able to get around that by removing the picture and lines 1-6 and the last line (generated by...) leaving only a header row and the data. Now, I get an error from Excel when I try to sort:
"This operation requires the merged cells to be identically sized."
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;813974

After some research, it appears that the "Components" column is the source of the trouble - I never used that column before. It creates an additional row for each issue that applies to more than one component.
Do you have any suggestions as to how to easily unmerge the cells as a workaround? And would you agree, this is not desirable behaviour in the first place?
I've attached a sample excel report produced from the test project. Look at rows 3-4 and 9-10.
I am guessing version info and perhaps other fields might act similarly. thx.