Thanks for the help guys. Actually, my engineer roommate came back and saw me going insane over the bike. It's crazy, he owns a motorcycle and likes to work on cars, but he somehow reverse engineered that dang derailleur and fixed the problem. It took hours for him to figure out how it worked from the ground up, but in the end, it ran better than it did before. I was pretty amazed with his ingenuity and so very relieved.