Mackarackit,
If I have to use your Shiftin/out method I can get by, but I see no reason the I2C commands shouldn't be working. Especially since I need to read a sting of data on each read and I2Cread does that very easily with STR. All the I/O pins are set up correctly (All digital, all interrupts disables, direction correct…). If someone could try reading one of these eeproms on a 18f14k22 I would love to hear of your results.

I had a similar issue on a 18f46k22 where I was trying to compare all 28 ADC pins with each other pin in turn one at a time and I saw a strange result (Incremented after a certain point) and it turned out that there was a bug in PicBasic pro which got fixed. This is looking like a bug to me as well