shipping cost to be determined - not $0.00

My client has products that are too variable in dimension to set up shipping costs per product for customers ordering multiple products, which is most of their on-line customers. They want to say "we will contact you with shipping costs", which I have been able to add. But I cannot find a way to get rid of this:

Flat Rate (Best Way): $0.00
which is in all 3 ordering steps & in the order confirmation email sent to the customer. Of course, this is causing problems because their shipping is not free.

So far, all efforts by me to remove this have resulted in the ordering process stopping (not continuing to the next step).

1. Is there a "to be determined" shipping module available anywhere? (Seems a lot of others would like this, going by searches in this forum.)

2. If not, is there any way to allow $0.00 to be the amount used in calculation (by a module like flat rate), but simply not show "$0.00" to the client?

3. If not, is there any way to allow text to be used in the flat shipping module's "amount" field (from the admin area) and have the program show the text (to the customer, during the ordering process & confirmation email), while processing the amount as $0.00? Simply putting text into this field in the admin area results in the text being ignored & the amount still showing as "$0.00".

My client is desperate to have this done & I am a graphic artist, not a programmer. I am adept enough to paste code into appropriate files, but can't figure out what to put, where.

Any help or direction would be greatly appreciated. I'm tired of working off the clock trying to figure this out!!!