I have worked on a lot of projects similar to the one Mike describes. It's really common when you have a client group of more than 1 person to find they don't all agree. I've watched simple one-page projects skyrocket out of control simply because the client team members all wanted something different.
My web horror story deals with a singing group in the local area which I developed a web site for. With only three members (two ladies and one guy), I assumed they would all be on the same page, as far as overall ideas for the web site. The two ladies, you couldn't have asked for two finer individuals to work with. Honest, tactful, knowledgable about what they wanted to feature. The guy in the group was right the opposite - obnoxious, attempted to be intimidating and overide the majority opinion (this HAS to be done this way...) without consulting with the other two members.
The straw that broke the project was the use of imagery, with the two ladiess wanting, and politely requesting updated images they'd provided to be used, while the overbearing guy was nothing short of a pain in insisting the "original" photos be used, with the "original"s being outdated by three years or more.
Regrettably, after tolerating the guy's behavior as long as I could, I sent along the text information and the images the ladies graciously provided, and advised them to a.) find another web site designer to maintain their site for the, and b.)for one of the two of them to be THE spokesperson for their group, an idea I unfortunately was unable to persuade them to do while I still had them as a client.
I hated to drop them from my client base, but I learned a good lesson - deal primarily with one individual when working with a group or a company. It definitely has prevented such from occurring again!
It's important that you figure out how to solve the problem - and it looks like Mike did. Another way to handle this is to write it into the contract who provides final decisions on a project.
