And a note to everyone else:

There is a LOT happening on the real right life front, but I'm going to do my best to come full circle and help you guys out. I know how frustrating this stuff can be. Unfortunately it's time consuming and brings in no dough to help me live. Cue next paragraph...

I wound up spending a lot of time for the past year-ish completely focused on Magento to bring in some dough and make ends meet. Soon after, my attention to ZC seriously waned after it became clear that the ZC team was having (and still is having) big delays (on the order of years) with the release of the next major version. http://www.zen-cart.com/forum/showth...16019&page=148 (i believe you need to be logged in to view this 148 page thread that was frozen in February 2010 regarding ZC 2.0. Note that it was created in Dec. 2008) However, as I'm sure you've noticed, they have recently started pumping out lots of bugfix updates and it seems things are starting to pick up steam again. (Exciting news.)

Regards,
Meech