Hi Dstrunin,
I would still use the rel canonical tag even with or without the filter in place. So if you have a list of products displayed unfilter at companyname.com/productcategory/page1.htm, I would add a rel canonical with it pointing at companyname.com/productcategory/page1.htm. For the filtered results,companyname.com/productcategory/filters/page1.htm , the canoncial tag would still point to companyname.com/productcategory/page1.htm.
It doesn't hurt to have a canonical tag point to the same page it's on.
If you can't do that I would meta noindex those filtered pages and remove the robots.txt stuff. Robots.txt doesn't tell Google they can't index it it only says they can't crawl it. So they could still index old stuff they crawled before you did the robots.txt stuff or index the title tags.
Casey