I saw that caveat about staggered grids.
But the temperature variable is at the grid cell centers, where the
vertical coordinate is defined, and usually IDV behaves nicely. It's
usually only slicing of U and V that IDV doesn't like, because it
can't figure out the vertical coordinate.
As a test, I eliminated everything except the info on the grid cell
centers (no longer a staggered grid) and it still bombs.
Try to geo-subset "temp" in this non-staggered file:
http://stellwagen.er.usgs.gov/rps/share/geo_subset_bug.nc
At least I couldn't do it.