Sprint HTC Hero :: Get Google Login Information Back?

About a couple of weeks ago, I purchased an HTC Hero (Sprint) and had it all going... until I lost it at work a couple of days later. I instantly deactivated it through Sprint and, the short of it, I was unsuccessful in retrieving it and finally received my replacement phone yesterday.

As I went to Sprint to activate it, they asked me to enter my Google account information. As I went to enter it, the password was invalid. After entering all of the possible passwords that I generally use, they were all invalid. So I came home, got on my laptop and tried to retrieve it through Google's website, thinking this would be resolved pretty quickly. Except the security question that was asked was not the one I remember entering in when I first registered my Google account, so the password was unable to be retrieved.

However, the strange part is that there's an option that says that if you can't answer the security question, they will send an e-mail to your alternate e-mail address. So I clicked that... and it said that it sent an e-mail to a Hotmail account (it had the e-mail address X'd out). The problem with that is that my alternate e-mail address is a Yahoo! address, which Google confirmed to me when I asked them to confirm if maybe I was entering a wrong username.

So it's a strange dilemma... when I ask them to confirm my username, they can send an e-mail to my actual backup address. But when I try to request or reset my password, the security question is different, and Google send it to some Hotmail address that is unknown to me. I tried filling out a form on Google's website that would try to get the account back in your hands if you provide enough data, but given how little I had my original phone, I couldn't answer all of it, so subsequently, that failed.

I guess the question is: are there any other alternatives I have? Is it possible that when I lost my phone that the person who found it got it and changed the information on me? It's just very weird and something I'd like to get to the bottom of.