Thanks Elle and Jim! Good to know this thread is helping some people and I'm not alone out there. I appreciate the tips from everyone, and though I'd be happy to write some more posts, Jim C., I hope that my problems with PP are limited!
For what it's worth, for my workflow it was Jim Simon's workaround that was best. The "Fill Left, Fill Right" solution gave me the most flexibility when working with my audio. It will also save me a bunch of set-up time the next time I have a project this big to work on.
The edit I wrote about is almost finished, and I have to say that as a former FCP user, I am impressed by Premiere Pro. There are more than a few little things I'd like to see ironed out (being able to sort your clips in Icon View, anyone?), but for the most part I feel as if PP's streamlined workflow probably saved me a day or two as opposed to editing with FCP 7.
Strangely enough, one of the major problems I had throughout the edit was audio. These ranged from workflow issues like the one addressed in this post to a host of strange bugs, like audio constantly dropping out for no reason, not being recognized, or (most disturbing), audio just not loading at all and Premiere telling me it was gone. Audio clips would simply disappear. I've done some research, and it seems that these are common problems. It's strange to me, as one would think that it would be all the complexities associated with video that would be the hardest to tackle, but in my experience Premiere handles video great. It's audio that is dodgy and unreliable, which is a huge problem. One can only hope that they keep improving...