Starting to have my fill of the Yaris... (Split CV Boot)

[detroiter]

So while crawling underneath the Yaris today, I noticed on the drivers side lower arm area, some sort of muddy looking stuff. Figured it was just dirt buildup yet while looking at the passenger side, there was nothing. So I go to clean it and it feels alot like some sort of grease, definately not dirt. Well after some tooling around, come to find a small rip in the CV boot. It's not flapping and you can't even see the opening, so it must be still keeping stuff out. I havn't had any sort of noises or clicking, so I would have never even known if it wasn't for looking close underneath. I just wonder what the hell would have caused it to happen.

Called Toyota dealership and they tell me they don't cover any sort of work like that, it's not part of warranty. I call local parts stores and the CV boot is $50 and that if I needed two joints to be replaced, each one is $500. F' that.

Any ideas on what I should do to try and resolve this? The manager at one dealer said to bring it in and if it wasn't something that I intentionally did (run something over, damage it by accident, etc), that he would replace the boot and the joints if needed. Knowing them though, they will try to weasel their way out of it.

Like I said, there's no noises or clicks at all so anything possible that I can just patch the boot up or something inexpensive?