I've got to agree with g1smd .. you might not want differing meta tags but you most certainly NEED them if you are to stand ANY hope of having your efforts found in ANY search engine i.e. Bing & Yahoo or Google.
Title tags & Meta Descriptions are the lifeblood of being found by your potential customers who are looking for what you are selling. If the search engine bots see the same head tags on every page they will list one of your pages and only once.
You can help yourself further by making sure that in your product description you use the product name again and give it H1 tags, you can reinforce that by paraphrasing your meta description within the product description about half way through and wrapping it in H2 tags.
example
<title>Red Fluffy Cuddly Teddy Bear - ID45</title>
[note: ID45 represents a manufacturers product code]
<meta name="keywords" content="red teddy bear,fluffy teddy bear,cuddly teddy bear, id45" />
<meta name="description" content="A nice cute red cuddly teddy bear ideal for children or the one you love as a special gift." />
<body>
Product Description:
<h1>Red Fluffy Cuddly Teddy Bear</h1>
blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah
blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah
<h2>The ideal teddy bear gift for children or loved ones</h2>
blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah
blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah
</body>
If you must alter that file add
<meta name="robots" content="noodp, noydir" />
That will force the search engines to use your description rather than make one up based on the content of your page. The aim you should have is to make your description, for each product and page look attractive to prospective customers. Think of it as your 155 character sales pitch.
By taking that little bit of extra time to make each page unique you give yourself a thousandfold increase that your site might be the one your new customer sees and chooses first.
If you want the same headers on every page just put up a one page website.
As for re-indexing ... there is no hard and fast rule. Sometimes I see changes to my sites within an hour or two ... sometimes it might be a week ... I've never known it to take more than two weeks
