How many re-seats of a toilet does it take to stop a leak in the dining room ceiling?

This isn't quite as dramatic as Emily's bathroom saga, but again, Ethan and I are not the do-it-yourself home improvement people. We're more of the sign the check/swipe the credit card types. In any case, there's been a never ending ugly spot on our dining room ceiling that has grown to a huge crack. We've had the bathtub drain replaced, the toilet re-seated, the toilet replaced, tile resealed, the toilet re-re-seated, but on Friday the damn spot decided to grow some mold. Great. Just what I need. Incidentally, Eric also started getting sick yesterday (runny nose/cough/sneezing), but I'm going to blame that on the sudden change in weather and the fact that another enormous tooth seems to be coming through.

So we call our favorite plumber (more like we're their favorite customer) and request our friend Chad to come out, since he usually seems to know what he's doing. He's the one who got it to stop leaking for a good 3 months, at least. Chad comes out, cuts a pretty hole in the ceiling, and discovers a leaky elbow. Of course, replacing this requires cutting all sorts of pipes, re-re-re-seating the toilet (no charge this time), replacing a flange (?). So I suggest, if they're going to pick up the toilet anyway, couldn't they bust up the tile and rip out the vanity? Both are ugly, and how much can this be?

Silly Jessica. Silly, silly Jessica. If you want to do this then you may as well re-do the whole darn thing, to the tune of several thousand dollars. So I'm stuck with the ugly tile (which Chad says looks like a 5 yo laid it), a scratched vanity (Ethan tried to clean the sink with steel wool), but several thousand dollars in our bank account. And a hole in the ceiling that we will not be patching until we are truly convinced that the leak has been fixed. Isn't it pretty?