I've seen similar symptoms in a lens yhat had a slightly warped lensmount, causing the af coupling to bind and seize. trying to use that lens may result in the af motor in your camera body to burn out.

any computer software programmers want an idea for a project?
hack a program for the pantone huey to make it work as a color light meter.
If you make it mac compatible, every laptop can be use to read color temp....
might be useful for those that don't want to shell out for a minolta handheld colormeter.....

Any tripod is better than none.
heavier is more stable.
my preference is to go with a lighter model (I use a manfrotto, with pistol grip), there's a giottos model Gerri's eying up. both of which are fairly light (I think carbonfibre is too light and way too expensive). notice the shot of me chasing a moose in another thread and you'll see me holding my camera in my right hand, and my wrapped up with pipe foam and duct tape manfrotto in my left hand. picked up together and mobile...
my rational is this the lighter weight aluminum pods from reputable companies stand up to abuse better than cheaper brands..and I do abuse my equipment...my manfrotto has seen swamp, dessert, arctic, beach and snow for years and with regular maintenence is still in great shape. It's no good if it breaks, its no good if you leave it behind cauase it's too heavy to carry.
normal, light use, with little abuse, cheaper a tripod should serve you well.

I'd like an lcd filter built into the flash units that balances the flash output to match the ambient color esp when using custom white balance settings.

here' a tip that won't cost a penny and may solve your problem:
hand anybody a tube, or camera, or scope and ask them to look thru it, and you'll notice the human instinct is to close one eye and hold the object up to the other eye to look.
train your self to hold your camera up to one eye, while keeping the other eye open and you'll soon be spotting with the "naked" eye then switching you focus to the "camera eye" just prior to releasing the shutter.

if you shake your canons you can hear a little rattle.
that would be a ballbearing that sits inside a little geo-dome-like buble full of electrical contacts. rotate the camera and the little ball rolls around makeing a closed circiut where ever it lands.
my two requests would be this:
my canons have a web enables function (not documented in any of thier manuals) that allows my apache webserver (and bonjour network) to talk with the camera and operate it remotely from within my web browser...
a wi-fi adaptor.

(my other wish would be a user adjusteable built in variable nd filter over the sensor. but nobodies invented that one yet)

Matt, I saw an ad for that buffalow drive and it is mac compatible(and could clean up the medusa's hair like clump of wires and power bars that llive behind the stack of ads external drive cases that sit beside my elegant Macs) It's like having a family of redneck hillbilliess move into a rich neighborhood with thier trash and derilect vehicles all over thier lawn)....and manesty 6 sata drives? who hoo!
I gotta sell more images so I can buy more stuff!!!
my better half read my post about a shock collar for bill gates an she wants one for me...next time I go near an electronics store my "behavioral conditioning" treatment begins...lol

Although I've not had to use it on my machines, I do have data recovery software that i've used to help a friend or three...I bought it in case a memory card gets corrupted...another interesting mac trick..
boot the machine while holding down the letter t and it fires up in "Target" mode which, if the machine is connected to another mac with a firewire cable, allows the "Target" mac to be recognized as a firewire disk drive.
this is a handy way to run disk recovery softare, or copy large amounts of data.

but the real issue for Manesty could be just a change in habit. He obviously has the skills, software, and hardware to recover from disaster...for many, those files would either be gone, or an expensive job to recover.

here's my $0.02:

try to get into the habit of downloading those files to hd, then burning a cd/dvd, rotate your memory cards, and then erase/format the card in your camera just before you use it( wouldn't it be nice to find that your pics were sitting ther on your other memory card, when your computer crashed?). I'm adding a new twist to my routine, the laptop allows me to back-up my files to my .mac account (remote server)when travelling. I consider my hd inside my computer to be Temporary workspace, and upon finishing a project, the files get archived....the hd in my machine is not my storage vault...

now don't go doing anything hasty...check out the mac mini.....
set up as a media server, attached to your tv( with an adaptor) and voila! dvds, movies, iphoto and Itunes, web surfing all with a remote and easy to use Front Row software! and networked to your windows system ( a kvm switch for use with your pc monitor and keyboard)....at a price that won't force you to sell off any Pentax Gear....And like I said the new intel macs run windows....you can keep you old programs, Apple did this right and MS is reeling from from a nasty uppercut...watch how many people switch in the next 20 months..you'll see what I mean....

I know you weren't knocking Apple. (it was me bashing windoze...lol)...
but truthfully...make your next laptop a macbook pro, partition the Hd and infect one partition with Windoze and use mac osx on the other. (using Bootcamp u can boot into windoze for work, and osx for your photography and everything else (you can also run parallelles and switch between os's as easily as switching between windows (osx in one window and windows in the other!) the macbooks (running windoze)have actually been out performing similarly equipped windoze only, laptops in testing...
the ilife suite and pse4 will astound you. the automator program and applescript will have you spending less tim in front ot the pc and way more time to take photos. And no they're not paying me, but I wish they would.
ps, setting up a raid is a simple 2 click procsess. I got three machines running with a terabyte of storage, with each machine bootable off an external backup drive...if one drive failes, I reboot the machine, and it runs off the external backup till I get a replacement drive...total downtime 1 mins, while the computer reboots. loss data - none.