IIRC, even if you let lame generate nogapped VBR files without a VBR headers, you still get gaps.

That's not the way I remember it being reported. My recollection is that someone reported "If I don't add the VBR headers back in, it plays fine. But the player has other problems with headerless files, so I add them in. And that's when it plays wrong." And later we found out that the reason was his header-adding tool, not the player. That's the way I recall it happening.

I could be wrong, of course. I frequently am.