Sure. That would be another solution, which I was going to offer you, but it appears that you managed to solve it yourself. The reason I didn't mention turning off the states in admin panel is because you told in your post that you wanted to write something else instead of 'Other'.
Well, either way I am glad that we were able to solve at least something in X-Cart, because there are a lot of things in this shopping cart, which do not make sense.
Take care.
