After going through a couple of different apple support techs, It was the third one named Ted who helped solve my issues. At least for now I can say this time they "Fixed it".

Honestly, I don't want them to fix it, I just want them to give me my money back. They've tacked on three free months of a product that doesn't work ... lade fricken da! Rebates to people who bought MobileMe thinking it would be a great addition to our $300 iPhones and 2-year AT&T contracts is far more reasonable (it's not like Apple's short on cash these days). I'd even be cool with a $100 credit to the Mac Store.

As for how to "live" without MobileMe, well, I'd already turned off push email to save iPhone battery life so that didn't matter, and Google's free IMAP works just as well as Apple's (and with a Google Apps individual account, I can get it for my personal domain). As for syncing info and files, I'm using a mix of dropbox (http://getdropbox.com) for non-document files (docs for the most part hang out in the Google Docs cloud), fruxx (http://fruux.com) for iCal and Address Book between Macs, and spanning sync (http://spanningsync.com) to keep things up to date on my Google Apps contacts and calendar. I'd just use spanning sync and run both computers through Google Apps, but it takes up more resources than fruux so I run that for the sake of the laptop (a 3+ year old iBook G4).

Of those three programs, spanning sync is the only thing that costs, but I bought a cheap lifetime subscription when they came out so it's almost free to me. I'd comment on how you can save $5 on your subscription to spanning sync, but I don't want to jack up your comments with ads that will benefit me. ;)

Thought it was just me. It completely messes up some of my contacts. For example it picks one person and give them 12 or so of my other contacts' email addresses. Frustrating!