If, in a hypothetical situation, two earth-like planets fell into a
stable orbit around each other, say around 1 million miles apart. Just
like the moon orbits earth. What would it be like on the surface of
either planet?  Would orbiting a larger body(ie a star) degrade the
mutual orbit the two planets around each other?  How close could the
planets be to each other before the difference in centripetal and
centrifugal forces rip them apart?  How high do you think the tide
would be?  What would these massive gravitational forces do to the
surface crust of the planets?

A link to some gravity-related physics applets etc would help a little.

The smallest distance between the two earths could not be less than
185 km, since the orbit becomes too unstable at that distance. It is
extremely unlikely that you could have an orbiting distance that short
anyway. The closer the two planets were to each other, the faster
they'd have to be orbiting each other in order to not crash into each
other. At 185 km, they'd have to be going around each other at about 8
km/sec or about 18,000 mph, or one orbit every hour and a half. I do
not think that the orbit of the two planets would be affected by
orbiting around a star, at least not noticeably. I think the tides
would be much bigger, but I don't think the crust of the earth would
be moved or anything. Here's a fun little java thing that I found and
was playing with for awhile:
http://www.geocities.com/Paris/6502/impact.html

An Earth size planet 1 million miles away would cause tides about 3/8
the size of those caused by the moon.  The minimum distance a moon can
orbit a planet before the tidal forces break it up is known as the
Roche limit - I'm not sure how well it can be applied to 2 bodies of
the same size and density, but assuming the calculations are still OK,
Earths 1 & 2 would tear themselves apart at a distance of about 20,000
miles.

Ian G.

Roche limit, THAT's what I was thinking of.  Thank you both very much,
you've been very helpful.