Like the others, I know of one family that has been working on getting a loan mod for many months. They were told they had to stop making payments before the mod would even be considered. Last I talked to them, they were still in process.
When you first posted, I looked up some sites where people were sharing their “success stories” on mods — with everyone sharing their tips and tricks on how to get principal reductions. I believe someone originally linked the sites on one of the threads here, but I couldn’t find it here or via Google.