We will be doing something about International in regards to that value in <ValueOfContents> ... however until we hear more about the issues with this, we don't want to just jump into a "possible" fix but rather give this a little more thought ...
I really appreciate that your were able to be so concise on reporting this issue and working through this temporary fix ... it helps in trying to address this issue on a broader scale ...
While we try to test the add-on plugins that we release as much as we can, there are always improvements to be made and issues that we have not run into on everything ...
USPS is unfortunately one of the more difficult to do as in some ways there is a lot of documentation and in other ways not nearly enough ... the worst of it is when there are issues that have such a broad spectrum of issues that you think you are covering all of the bases only to discover there are so many more related to the documentation on the broad spectrum of the shipping issues across an entire globe ...
Then, should the specs deviate in anyway to documentation, and unfortunately that was a large problem with the USPS changes for July 28, 2013 the little grey cells can only work so fast ... alas ... such is the life of an elf ... :blink: