It seems strange to me that if you have thrashed out the routing details of the ticket with an agent (which I presume would cover fare calculation and taxes) that the ticket office would have so much trouble issuing the thing.

Is it something peculiar to AA? All of my owe's have been issued by BA or QF and so far they have been without problem. I've got a week before I need the ticket issued so I will try to book this with the AA rtw desk and then try getting AA in ARN to issue it remotely for collection at the airport. If I have problems with that then I think I will probably deal directly with BA in ARN.

Thanks again everyone for the input.