It appears that the problem itself is not understood. This is a BUG which I VERY CLEARLY detailed in my initial posts. The solution is NOT a FEATURE to delete all the billable checks. The solution is that when you create a PO from a sales order, it should not cause the items on that PO to be billable. This seems like a very reasonable thing to require a bug fix for, especially for people like myself who have spent years "unchecking" all of the "billable" boxes when they they receive a PO for billing simply because the QB people won't fix the problem.

QB now disables CC processing and other features if you don't upgrade to the latest version of QB (a good way to hold you hostage to pay for the upgrade) but I agree that if they can't fix a bug like this, why spend the money to upgrade?