Apps in iTunes disappear; 'Connect to iTunes to Use Push Notifications'

Question

Right, I synced my iphone up a while back to add a song to my phone.
Since then, I've had several problems I have yet to resolve:
1) I keep getting 'Connect to iTunes to Use Push Notifications.'
     I searched through the forums and have yet to find a solution, nothing seems to work. Tried changing sims, rebooting/resyncing, messing with the notifications, etc., etc., etc. Nothing has worked.
2) I keep getting a notification when I try to do anything from my Macbook to my iphone that says my phone is not synced to my library, would I like to sync to my library now' or something to that effect. It doesn't matter how many times I add it, it will not recognise it.
3) All the apps I had downloaded that are associated with my iPhone, my iTouch, and my iPad have deleted themselves. I plug in the iPhone, all it recognises is the apps it came with, nothing else.
The iPad and iTouch are not giving the pop up for the Push Notifications because I have not synced them in a while.
Phone is a 3gs, running 5.1.1. I would prefer not to upgrade to the 6.0 if possible, I have heard terrible things about the upgrade from friends and would really prefer not to upgrade until all the bugs are fixed. Also, I'm reading other posts online that say they're still having the problem after upgrading to 6.0, and I don't want extra frustrations with the upgrade as well as all this. iPhone is NOT jailbroken, has never been jailbroken.
Macbook Pro is running 10.6.8.
iTunes is running the newest version 10.7
Some of you must have had this problem, any help would be appreciated, that pop-up for Push Notifications is really driving me insane.
Help!
thanks

Answer 1

Did you get any help on this? From what I can see from surfing this site, it's a BUG that no one has offered a solution to. It sometimes happens after a 'reset' and going to ITunes does not offer a way to 'set up push notifications'.