[General Questions and Answers] jdjeff:
I've read just about everything I can find on this subject and have yet to find a solution. I am not sure if this is phone specific and since this is my first post, I figured I'd try the general QA forum. So here goes:

This all started when I was looking to unlock my SIM for an upcoming trip to Costa Rica. I have a stock ROM Firmware version 2.2.1. in a Samsung Infuse 4G. I had some other things in mind for later like flashing to a custom ROM, but I wanted to get some of the junk off the phone and get the SIM unlocked first. So feeling a little frisky with the uninstaller of TB, I started getting rid of some of what I thought may have been bloatware....family maps, google books, bar code reader, etc. I don't remember now if play store was one of those apps. I really don't believe I did uninstall it. If it was questionable in any way, I left it installed. But who would care right? I had the whole phone backed up.

Ok, so I see that I needed to be rooted for this. So I followed some QBking77 tutorials on YT. Got the superoneclick application and got it rooted with no problem. Then, I followed the suggestion to get Titanium Backup. I bought the paid version and did an entire backup. In the meantime, superuser updated itself and everything seemed fine. I shut the phone down and came back some hours later to attempt an unlock. After boot, I started TBackup and it was hanging on a message saying searching for license. I restarted the app and it kept hanging. It finally gave me a message to reinstall the Pro version key. Well, I uninstalled it...not knowing any better....and then could not download it from the store. The store still had these apps showing installed and purchased. This is when I began seeing the force close of Play Store app.

Ok...I'm trying to provide detail here and this is why it is so long winded. But I began looking for solutions to this issue all over the place. I saw the solutions to clear the cache and data and force close the app...reboot the phone. That didn't work. I found apk google store files and began trying to install those to the SD card. That wouldn't work. So now I got the big idea to reset to factory. I did that twice and that didn't work. Tried repeating all the suggested solutions after factory reset. That didn't work. I ended up losing my backup from before. So what's left?

I figured I would try to flash the ROM now and get a fresh start with a new OS. Well, it turns out that many of the apps I need like root explorer, need the paid version to modify the recovery files. So I found an app called file expert that is free, but I need to have a paid version to modify root files. I also saw a solution to google play which involved putting the apk file in system/apps. But it won't let me do that either without a paid version.

So I'm stuck and very frustrated. I'm caught in this never ending loop where the files I need require google play to purchase and I can't do anything to get it working.

I don't know if I'm posting in the right forum. I'm all tense about asking questions. But I'm really at the end of my rope here. I probably screwed something up without knowing it. But I see that there are alot of complaints with this force close. But many of those complaints seem to be getting resolved. The last thing I tried was to download vending 3.5.16.apk I've been putting these files on my internal SD card and trying to install from there. This is very frustrating. And it even gets more frustrating when you see the solutions can be to download something from the market. If I could do that, I wouldn't be typing this.

I apologize if this is in the wrong forum. And if you want me to take it somewhere else, I will. But I'm at a point right now where I don't care who yells at me. I'm desperate.

Thanks in advance.

EDIT: And just to clarify, everything else seems to be working. I tried all the google apps (maps, gmail, etc.) My phone works, wifi, camera, etc. I get notifications of updates....and when I accept (or when it's an auto update), google play store starts and force closes. But other than that, the phone seems to have all it's functionality intact. And now, if I go to the store via my pc, it shows all my prvious app history including installs and purchases, but says I have no device.