drjiohnsmith:
if this tests out,
it would be a great improvement / addition to the standard lib.
Well, that would of course be nice 
In fact, I would prefer that the Arduino came with a lot more user-created libraries by default (or would provide an easy way of getting to them, perhaps using a package manager), so people would start building on work of others rather that reinventing the wheel every time.
But for now, I would appreciate it very much if people would testdrive the library and see what is missing and if bugs pop up. I put the library on the Playground here, and am in the process of writing an library on top of EEPROMex that implements variables that can recall /store themselves from EEPROM.