How can I get Google to reload robots.txt? One of our emplyees
accidentally overwrote this file a while back and our Google results
have been hurting. I created a new sitemap.xml.gz and everything, but
Google continues to insist on using the cached version of the file. Is
there any way to ask that this file be reloaded by Googlebot?

I had a similar problem a while ago and from that experience the only
thing i could do was to sit and wait for the new robots.txt file to be
re-cached which took about a month. In the meantime i think the
'robots all' meta-tag on our homepage helped as i did not notice any
impact on our Google results.