I have a Kodak point-and-shoot and a Nikon dSLR. I won't give advice on brands and models. Previous posts gave great advice on features. I'd guess you can't go too wrong with any of the major brands. Higher resolution is nice, but the file sizes get big too. If you get high enough zoom it is handy, but be ready to bring along a tripod to prevent blurry pics (good idea anyway).

The Kodak gives beautiful color and as mentioned can use AA batteries (I use lithiums), which is a real plus when out and about, though I use the Kodak rechargable batteries with the docking station around home. If I were to do it all over again I wouldn't buy the docking station, but would instead use a separate NiMH charger.

At first I used the Kodak software, but no longer.

I strongly recommend use of Adobe Photoshop Elements software for uploading, organizing, and editing pics. It is FANTASTIC software, especially for the price.

These days I only use a card reader for uploading pics to the PC. When I insert a card, the Adobe software recognizes that is has been inserted and downloads the pictures. I use an option that creates a new folder for each date a pic was taken. Then I use Elements' tagging capability to associate tags with different kinds of pictures (family, vacations, outings, scouts, school, special events, etc...) so it is VERY easy to find those pics later on.

Next, selected pics are uploaded to my Smugmug.com photo site using a "share" feature built right into Elements in cooperation with Smugmug (and a few other photo sites). I started using Smugmug to share pictures with parents of Scouts and school-mates when it became too much of a pain to e-mail them or burn them onto a disk.

Finally, there is the issue of backing up pics. DON'T FORGET TO BACKUP YOUR PICS!!! I use Elements' backup feature to do this, and it works pretty well. At first I used CD's. Then I used DVD's. Now I have enough pics that I need to buy a portable hard drive to speed up the process.