Orange UK - I'm Unimpressed

I recently got a cheap Orange PAYG Alcatel One Touch S'Pop, mostly as a way to use up points accrued on my Orange Cash card but also as way to have an "impersonal" phone number (ie, a number that if it ever starts to get heavily spammed, I can bin without too much bother). While the phone is OK (for a £30 Android phone from Argos - I wasn't expecting much), Orange appears to be useless.

The first problem is that I can't register on their site. When you try and register on Orange, you get handed over to EE's website and EE's website unhelpfully throws up

Sorry, we don't recognise this number.

And says that I should call customer services. Where I immediately run into a second problem (which has just gotten worse).

The second, and much, much larger problem is that credit just disappears. The £10 top up that I had to buy with the phone was gone at least a week before the end of it's month long lifespan, even though I had hardly used the phone (the phone wasn't even switched on most of the time). So I loaded 20 minutes of talk time as a reward from my Orange Cash card and while I was able to use it for a few days to make a few short phone calls, it also seems to have disappeared from my account. So today I tried loading another 20 minute reward, and while I have received the text telling me that it has been added, Orange is still refusing to let me make any calls, stating that "you currently have no talk time registered on your account". And without talk time, there's no way to contact Orange Customer Services on the phone, as contacting customer services is a chargeable call.

As I'm unwilling to buy any more credit that is liable to just vanish into thin air before I can contact Customer Services to tell them that credit is just disappearing into thin air, I'll see if @OrangeUK are any help before I bin the SIM card.