So are we able to continue mining while a fix is finalized? I'm in no rush to go through the process of updating to a beta wallet if a final one is going to be released soon anyway. I still seem to be synced to the network in the daemon, it's just that obviously the wallet cannot currently receive any new transactions.
Everybody can continue mining and sending money with an updated simplewallet software.
All daemons are ok without any updates because daemons don't care about "extra" field.
Buggy merged mining network is stopped an hour ago.
Please ask your friend not to test incompatible changes on the mainnet, that is what testnet is for