I agree with you, not the quickest thing to do !
I have an example for a stacked combination chart at
The chart is different from the one you are trying to do but i have tried to include notes as to all the minor tweaks to be done.
As for the chart that you are trying to achieve (as in my screen shot below), I was able to handle the scales by using the cieling and max functions in excel.Something like the follows
Manual Y Axis
Max limit : formula used in excel =CEILING(MAX(T28:T30),1000)
Min limit : formula used in excel =CEILING(MIN(T28:T30),-1000) - I did not use this though as there was no negative values in our case.
All the best !!
Regards,
Naresh Ganatra 
(BOB member since 2004-04-09)