I just had a read, about the noarchive, I found where http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/017128.html

Where it is claimed that Matt Cutts has said there is no penalty, BUT, if you have spammy signals it will be another signal.

so there is some truth in it, but only if you ae already a bit spammy.

I also found this video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XhrZKejdmEE

Matt mentioned it here. if you have been hacked, they may show he hacked page only to googlebot, so this can not be checked they also add noarchive.
so if they suspect a hack, and you have noarchive, you may have a problem, but he also stated in anouther videio that they will tell you you hhave a problem.

Yes its seen as too different urls

http://perthseocompany.com.au/seo/reports/violation/the-page-contains-multiple-canonical-formats

If you are uisng a windows server (IIS), you can fix this easy by using the IIS url-rewrite addon. it had a rewite as lowercase preset

Many say that sub domains are sperate, but i have never seen any evidence for this. i have used subdomains and find that they act just as sub-folders. Matt Cutts has said using sub-folders of sub-domain is a matter of personal chioce.

But many people have been moving their duplicate content to subdomains to aviod the panda update effect. I have no idea if this works to protect the root domain long term or at all, it just may take time for google to find it and call it as duplicate again.

i would go with the .net myself, why risk it, time is money.

As for the 301's, if you are keeping the same site structure then you can ddo this with one 301 redirect, if not I would go to WMT and find the pages with incomming links and 301 those pages only, there is nothing to gain from 301ing pages with no links. Ok maybe someone has a url bookmarked and may not find your new site, but it not too likly thats going to be a big problem

You probably have a US ip number, you generaly rank for the location of your web site.

you can have a look at this google post on the subject may help

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/12/new-markup-for-multilingual-content.html

17 likes since 2009?

12 tweets?

It seems like not even the owners family and staff could be bothered.

Where is the evidednece here that news releases work?

No one is claiming that they never ever work. so even if you could produse a few good examples, it is hardly evidecne, but It is my opinion you are better placeing the content on your own site.

Isthere any sign of penalty, a huge drop in rankings? if not then I would not worry too much about the links, they may be worthless but it si doubtfull they are doing harm,

You can ask gogole for reconsideration from GWMT, but i doubt that is the case unless your ranking has shown a huge drop. but it does not hurt to ask. i would be more worried about on page stuff. make sure your site is not hiiding keywors and the like.