WordPress MU suckage: ideas for alternate setup?

I've been struggling with this for about 10 days now...

I have a bunch of sites I'd like to switch to WP. They all look and work in similar fashion and I've put together a really smooth system of which I'm pretty proud, including a beautifully streamlined user upload system that combines 3 or 4 plugins to do all the work for me. It also seems that I hit every single "no solution" situation in WP with what I want to do, even though it's really not that complex.

The problem is that I'd like to have a unified login across all the sites and share their updates with each other. Sounds simple enough, right? Wrong.

The standard solution is WPMU. And that's where the problems start: the most important plugin relies on timthumb, which doesn't work on MU. So I found a version that does. But it still doesn't work on my setup and, when I change to the MU version, another plugin breaks. And this goes on and on and on, to the point where I delete the sites and start again. Rinse and repeat.

So I'm wondering if anyone has any other ideas of how to do this. I'm considering setting up one massive blog and doing everything with categories (one per original site) but I'm not sure how that'd work. I'm considering just slapping a Facebook login on the front and relying on that for a unified login. I'm also considering burning every computer I can find, giving up and becoming a chicken farmer.

Any thoughts, suggestions or ideas will be gratefully received, even if they sound silly.

Edit: Additional question... if I set up multiple (separate) blogs in subdirs, using the same DB with different prefixes, then share the user tables (yeah, I found a tutorial) will the shared cookies get screwed up if I point different domains at the subdirs? Oooh, technical.

 

This probably doesn't help but you should try a Google search. I know that's a pretty basic answer but I would try it, you never know what you'll find. But the unified login idea sounds pretty cool, I hope that works out for you.

 

You cannot even begin to imagine how many Google searches I have done.

I found a solution that works a million times better than WPMU (or WPMS, WP Network or whatever they're calling it now). I just need to figure out pointing a TLD to a different domain's subfolder and I'm sorted.