Interestingly, Google stopped the rapid re-indexing of NMohwy.com even though they have recently downloaded the sitemap. What's odd is that the immediate effect of breaking off this domain and setting it up separately with non duplicate (but similar) information was that the NEW pages were indexed with NEW cache dates. No effect on traffic.

NOW the pages at NMohwy.com show OLD cache dates (often Feb 5, 2005) and have been relegated to supplemental index except for Home page. The key event in this experiment will be the reindexing of the "new" pages which look very much like they did years ago before Google started hating these pages.

Were the problems getting properly indexed and ranked from GOOGLE changing it's opinion about our site or from SITE errors WE made as we improved things?

Even after a year of conferences, emails from Google and others, hundreds of questions, site reviews (even one by Google at Las Vegas PubCon!), and many changes made we don't know the answer to this simple question, though I think duplicate content filtering is be the most likely category for our problem.