As an update to this, I did some further work with some premium support clients that were experiencing issues and I have changed the patch.
At this time, it is just not going to work to try to retro-fit str_getcsv into PHP 5.2 installs. Yes that is my fault for changing the process to incorporate str_getcsv in the first place - this was a case of putting your finger in the dike to plugin one hole, but the water will find some other place to leak out as a result.
The reason for the change was to more easily allow commas into the dropdown values. But this leaves out users of PHP 5.2 and the current WP requirements are PHP 5.2.4.
So... I've been searching for a solution that will parse the string into an array appropriately for the 5.2 users. But that has yet to meet with success. So I've updated to the patch to simply roll back to the way that the plugin operated before.
See: http://rocketgeek.com/blog/wp-members-2-8-1-str_getcsv-patch-for-php-5-3/ for the updated version.
As I mentioned, this eliminates str_getcsv altogether, so for those users, the dropdown will be what it used to be - no commas in the dropdown values.
The 2.8.2 update for the plugin will look at the user's PHP version and adjust accordingly - that way, we can use str_getcsv in 5.3+ installs and still function in 5.2 without errors.
I will continue searching for a solution that will provide the same functionality for PHP 5.2 users, but that may not make it into the 2.8.2 release.