Whoa... Sorry for the triple post, but this is a major find: I managed to skip the first boss in the Waterworks! All that fooling around with opening the menu on event triggers paid off now.
http://dehacked.2y.net/microstorage.php/info/1723879958/skipbear.vbm
You have to hit Start just as MegaMan steps onto the ColdBears trigger line (on the last frame possible, basically), then go into a submenu twice, and after you exit, the screen will be black. You're still on the menu, so hit B or Start to close it, and instead of fighting a boss, MegaMan will be in the cutscene where he blasts the ice off!
The one side effect I've noticed so far is that when the game returns to Lan, you can't make him move at first. Only R and Start will do anything at this point, so you can either jack in and jack out to get Lan back to normal, or save the game and reset. Saving and resetting is a lot faster than jacking in, so this speedrun may end up with a save file after all if the glitch is legitimate. Does anyone with a real copy of the game on hand want to test this?
If the glitch doesn't mess up the story at all, then I don't have to worry about grabbing any new chips to speed up that battle, so LongSwrd S will probably turn out to be useless. This also means skipping the 2000 zenny from winning the battle, as it's no longer an efficient source of money now that it's skippable.
Okay, I suppose I'll put up this IceMan movie now.
http://dehacked.2y.net/microstorage.php/info/1953948401/IceMan5.vbm I keep wondering if there's a way to insert the WideSword or LongSword to take advantage of their range, but I can't find a way to mesh them with the strategy of bumping into ice blocks at certain times to nullify the next attacks.
Here's a battle against SkullMan, combining the quick shooting style from the Mettool battles with the masochistic swordplay of the IceMan battle.
http://dehacked.2y.net/microstorage.php/info/441025575/SkullSwo.vbm I was about half a second faster when I used LongSword in this battle, but even with only the 5 starting swords I was still faster than if I had used TripleSpear and GutsShoot. So now the TriSpear+GtsShoot strategy may only be useful on ColorMan and MagicMan, which throws the worth of the time sacrifice for TriSpear G into doubt.
Here is an example of how trivial a boss can be with TriSpear + GtsShoot.
http://dehacked.2y.net/microstorage.php/info/1200309599/ColorManT.vbm Having TriSpear saved almost 4 seconds over shooting an additional 20 times.