To make a long story as short as possible; all was going as well as could be expected working on a 13 year old Canadian car until I tried to remove the passenger side cv shaft. There is a carrier bearing on the shaft mounted in an aluminum bracket between the inboard tulip and differential. Apparently these or notorious for having the bearing seize to the aluminum bracket due to weather induced corrosion. I removed the retaining plate on the outboard side of the bracket but I wasn't having any luck with the pry bars so I purchased a cv removal tool (basically a fork that fits behind the inboard tulip and attaches to a slide hammer). Still no dice. So I did some research and quite often folks have to remove the entire bracket with the cv shaft as a whole then separate the two in a press, ok no problem I thought. The bracket is located on the casing with four bolts and two dowels and I've ensured the dowels are disengaged by placing a shim between the bracket and the dowels... Lol, still no dice.
So I've tried rotating the cv shaft to see if possible there are two internal splines that must line up to allow the shaft to be removed, surprise... no effect. 
I even went up to a 10lb slide hammer 
and you guessed it, nada!I know the drivers side shaft was held in place by a split spring ring on the end of the male splines, but it wasn't difficult to remove. So even if there is a split spring ring on the end of the passenger side shaft, it should've compressed under the load of the slide hammer.
Does anyone have any experience removing a passenger side CV shaft from an '08 with manual tranny that could enlighten me? My next step would be to either get a bigger slide hammer
or cut the shaft inboard of the carrier bearing and weld a nut onto the end of it and use the slide hammer directly on the shaft with the bearing and bracket out of the way 
