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Robert,
I hear your frustration. I remember when I first learnt to polar align. Many hours of cursing.
There are several ways to polar align. I used to use PhD as it gives you a pretty quick guide as to whether you're aligned or not. Recently, I have moved over to using a free program called EQAlign. Basically the program identifies a "safe zone" on the meridian and east/west. You then pick a known star within this safe zone and let the mount track for 10mins. The program will calculate drift and then will tell you how far you need to move the mount in azimuth (meridian alignment) or altitude (east or west alignment). I find it to be pretty accurate after one iteration but I like to do it twice. I generally now only worry about the azimuth adjustment and skip altitude.
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