White balance weirdness with Lightroom 2?

I'm using a Nikon D700, so I can't go back to Lightroom 1.4.1, which doesn't include support for the D700 (or does it?). I also can't do a side-by-side comparison of 1.4.1 and 2, but I do get the impression that 2 produces some rather crazy results when I use the eye dropper tool to do a white balance.
For example, I've got a shot of my brother, his wife, their son, and my son walking hand-in-hand through a parking lot. It's a lousy photo, so be thankful that I can't post it here. I try to do a white balance on my sister-in-law's shirt, which should be close to white, and I get a color temperature of 18,000 (and a tint of -5). If I do it on my brother's roughly white socks, I get a color temperature of 25,000! I can't remember ever having seen numbers that high with earlier versions of Lightroom. Other places in the photo (my brother's blackish backpack, my son's reasonably white shoes, etc.) get me color temperature values between 8000 and 13,000. In all cases, the adjusted photo looks way too yellow to me.
I realize that it's hard to diagnose my problem just from reading a description of it, but does anybody have any advice for me? I can't turn back the hands of time and do gray card reference shots, but I feel like I'm spending much more time trying to find a decent white balance than I ever did with 1.x, and with some photos I end up just throwing in the towel.
Technical details:
Lightroom 2 (Camera Raw 4.5) on a 20-inch PowerPC iMac, running OS 10.4

Thanks to all three of you for your helpful, speedy replies.
Eric, I used yousendit to send you a NEF file that's giving me trouble. I had the camera's white balance set to daylight when I took it, and they were walking through a mixture of sunlight and shade late in the afternoon, so obviously the white balance is not consistent throughout the photo, but as I noted in my original post, I can't understand why using the eye dropper tool in Lightroom 2 gives me such enormous numbers and such a yellow cast.
John, with that same shot I tried hitting "WB: Auto" in the Develop module, and the result was much more natural-looking than anything I could come up with on my own using the eye dropper. I then went back to other shots that had been problematic and found the same thing: "Auto" did a better job than I could. On the one hand, it's nice to know that such a powerful tool is available; on the other hand, it's a bit depressing to think that my best efforts at white balancing are still incompetent.
What's more, I still think that white balance in Lightroom 2 is behaving quite differently from what I was used to in Lightroom 1.x. Do I just have to try to become comfortable with the idea of ceding control of white balance to "WB: Auto"?

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Hello,
I purchased lightroom this week and I am having a serious problem importing images. I am using a new Macbook Pro with OS Snow leopard. My camera is a Canon 1ds Mark2.
When I import files half of them have this awful deep orange cast over them.
If you look at the thumbnails some of the frames are normal and then the next few turn orange, all shot within seconds of each other in the same place, no WB change on the camera or anything. What is this, a bug in Lightroom? I dont experience this problem with Photomechanic or Photoshop.

It doesn't sound like you know what actually caused the problem. What happens if you 'delete' (i.e. remove from LR only) some of the previous "orange" pictures and try to reimport them into LR?
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Do a little research on using Lightroom's White Balance Eyedropper tool – Here's one link:
http://help.adobe.com/en_US/Lightroom/3.0/Using/WS947672F1-AAB2-43de-9011-BDDECA05EC19.htm l

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@ssprengel
I get your point but that is exactly my problem.
Not only is there no pattern but also once I reset a file that got 5316+10 to "as shot" and select "make warmer" for it again it does get the correct value! As long as I select it as a single file without others.
So just to simplify my findings and explain what I have been doing all night:
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File 1: 5700 / -8
File 2: 5500 / -8
File 3: 5550 / -8
File 4: 5450 / -6
File 5: 5500 / -7
- CLICK "make warmer" once
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File 1: 6089 / -8
File 2: 5867 / -8
File 3: 5316 / +10
File 4: 5316 / +10
File 5: 5316 / +10
1 and 2 are okay!
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File 3: 5550 / -8
File 4: 5450 / -6
File 5: 5500 / -7
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Result:
File 3: 5316 / +10
File 4: 5812 / -6
File 5: 5867 / -7
File 4 and 5 are okay!
- SELECT File 3 again
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But that is no way to work, of course.
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Hi Everybody!
Got a bit of a problem...I set custom white balance for a lot of my photos (I'm a nightclub photographer) as sometimes the colours are so saturated the image becomes unusable. Unfortunately in Lightroom 4 the photos import with the correct WB I have set but when I click on them to develop the settings are changed and the image looks completely awful. I try and adjust the image back to the way I have taken it but it never looks the same....why is Lighroom not recognising the WB settings I set within my 5D?
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Suggestion for a workaround:
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regards
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White balance weirdness with Lightroom 2?

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