Simply incredible...
But for those who encountered errors, keep trying. I honestly was about to relegate my phone to a paperweight, but after trying and re-trying this a few times, I seem to be completely back to a stock ROM as if it just rolled off the line. I thought it was completely hopeless.
Not knowing much about the rooting process, I took a stab at it (I believe it was called the IHO-style ROM). While I was hoping for an improvement, this ROM made the phone almost unbearable. Massive lag, constant crashing, 0.05Mbps download speeds, and it got so hot I thought it was going to catch fire. When it was no longer able to sync to my Google account, the phone recommended I do a factory reset from "Privacy" under settings. Forgetting that I couldn't do this, I did it anyway and ended up stuck in a boot loop with the CWM recovery.
I managed to get out of the CWM recovery, but then I couldn't get back into it, and everytime I rebooted the phone, it re-installed the IHO ROM back to default.
Needless to say, after about 6 hours and a dozen different posts, this is the only one that did anything at all to help, and I couldn't be more thrilled. After running the software update per your instructions 3 or 4 times, the phone just magically booted up into the stock ROM, just as if I had just taken it out of the box from the store.
So thank you very much, and to any inexperienced users out there thinking about rooting this phone, DON'T!!! As my Pops always said "A bird in the hand is better than two in the bush". I will take the stock VM ROM anyday over anything else.
Kudos!
-Pete