Man, that looked like it would work. Made the changes, here is that section from the file:

/**
* Set some defaults
*/
$process = false;
$zone_name = '';
$entry_state_has_zones = '';
$error_state_input = false;
$state = '';
$zone_id = 0;
$error = false;
$email_format = (ACCOUNT_EMAIL_PREFERENCE == '1' ? 'HTML' : 'TEXT');
$newsletter = (ACCOUNT_NEWSLETTER_STATUS == '1' ? false : true);
/**
* Process form contents
*/

And removed the redundant lines.

customers_email_format field in the customer record is still not being updated in the database when a customer signs up. Other fields are being populated as they should. The field is totally blank. As before, if a customer goes into view or change my account information, clicks update, the customers_email_format field is written to.