Hi kgately,
We appreciate you taking the time to make the suggestion and can understand the inconveniece the current setup is creating. As you indicated, this is something that we have heard requested previously and we will be happy to pass it to developers again to evaluate as something to be implemented in the future.
For now, the best suggestion to work around this would be to still include the State/Province field on your registration forms, but not force it to be a required field. With this, at least international attendees will not be forced to make a selection which results in inaccurate information on your side.
Has there been any update on this issue? This is a HUGE problem for us -- we need to require state to be able to properly segment our leads, but we also have received many complaints from international cusotmers who are required to fill in a "state" when they select a country outside the US & Canada. Not requiring the state field is not an option. It seems that it should be an easy fix to simply add "none" or "not applicable" to a drop down list.