Haven't read the whole thread, but I'm having tons of success with gluing using Titebond II with a 5% water dilution. Just picked up a $2 copy of Talking Book instead of a VG for $5, glued it, and it looks better than the VG. Besides, I've only got to glue them once and then clean normally after that.
I've tried both Titebond, and Titebond II, with result similar to a lot of those that other people have posted. One of them releases more easily from the surface than the other, but (if I recall correctly) the price of easy release is a much larger amount of static electricity when you peel it off. The triboelectric effect generates a very impressive crackling.
In addition to the glue-peel, I've been using a Record Doctor II for a couple of decades... usually with a homebrew mixture of distilled water, isopropyl, and a bit of Triton or a similar lab-grade detergent (just enough to improve wetting). On dusty and lightly-dirty records this works pretty well.
Over the decades, I'd repeatedly read about the "Williamson" film-peel, which was apparently first developed by some archivists at the BBC, and popularized in Audio Amateur magazine by Reg Williamson in a two-part article back in 1981. I believe it's the original inspiration for the "glue peel".
The Williamson formula uses polyvinyl alcohol (the DuPont brand name is Elvanol), mixed with distilled water and heated until it dissolves. Optional ingredients that are commonly added include a bit of surfactant (typically Kodak Photo-Flo) as a wetting agent, some glycerine to make the film more flexible, and some alcohol to speed drying and inhibit gelling. Williamson also recommended pre-treating the records with an antistatic agent (Cyastat SN or Armostat 900, about .5% in distilled water) to eliminate "static cling" (one treatment was probably good for a lifetime, he said).
Most of the ingredients for this "peel" aren't hard to come by... but the antistatics are a problem. They're usually sold only in industrial quantities - getting a homebrewer's quantity is difficult. Old Colony Sound Labs used to sell Williamson-peel kits which included the necessary ingredients, but that's long in the past.
So, I decided to look around for a substitute... and after some research I found one that seems to be a real winner.
Bactine.
More precisely, benzalkonium chloride (the active ingredient in Bactine and some other medical "scrubs"). It's in the same general chemical family as a lot of the commercial antistatics, and has been used as such in a number of applications. It's got a good reputation for compatibility with vinyl. It acts as an effective surfactant, so you don't need Photo-Flo or another wetting agent. And, you can buy it in concentrated form (50%), by the pint, from commercial aquarium-supply dealers (a BK solution is used as a disinfectant for dip nets). The concentrate needs to treated cautiously (it's corrosive and eye-damaging in these concentrations).
So, I tried it, and have been very pleased with the results.
My trial recipe: 150 ml of cold distilled water, placed in a heat-proof measuring cup. Weigh and mix in 20 grams of Elvanol, stir well, place cup in a saucepan half-full of water on the stove, heat gently and continue to stir until the Elvanol all dissolves. Add 4 ml of vegetable glycerine (food-grade, from a health-food store) and 1/2 ml of 50% benzalkonium chloride. Stir to mix well. Place 20 ml of technical-grade isopropyl alcohol in a container, seal, drop it into a pan of hot water and wait for the alcohol to warm up (do NOT try to heat any alcohol directly - fire hazard!), then slowly stir the warmed alcohol into the warm solution. Slowly add-and-stir enough additional distilled water to bring it up to 200 ml total, then let it cool and transfer the resulting syrup into a plastic squeeze-bottle for storage and use. If it's kept tightly capped it will remain good for several months. It may tend to gel over time, but can be re-liquified by gentle warming.
This stuff applies very easily at room temperature (it gels at about 50F; can be used even in gel form but it goes on more easily when warmer), spreads out nicely, and wets the record grooves beautifully. It seems to dry faster than Titebond II. It will often self-release from the grooves as it dries. The film is pliable, somewhat stretchy, peels easily, and doesn't leave angular bits of hard stuff on the record surface if it happens to tear or break when you peel it off.
Best of all: no static. At least, none I can detect. There's no crackling when you peel, no tendency of the film (or anything else) to "jump back" to the surface via static attraction, no static noise when I play the LP, and no apparent buildup of anything on the stylus. It seems as if this approach works the way Williamson said that his Cyastat pre-treatment spraying does - it leaves a molecule-thin layer of the anti-static agent on the very surface of the vinyl. Most of the BK remains in the film and is removed as the film is peeled away.
As an additional tweak: 2.5 ml of 50% benzalkonium chloride concentrate, added to a liter of distilled water, makes up a stock solution of about 1:750, which is the concentration used in medical-scrub solutions. My tests show that this acts as an effective detergent, if you want to pre-scrub an LP to get off greasy fingerprints, and it rinses away cleanly. As BK has some antibacterial and antifungal properties, it might be a very good pre-treatment scrub for any LP which has been affected by mildew.