I completely agree with Paul. It's a pain, but it's worth it for irreplacable vinyl. A couple other notes:

- Make sure you've got some variable gain control. I'm piping my record player through a Radio Shack mixer into an Onkyo external USB sound card. I have the gain on both turned relatively far up, but that's what it takes to get the signals loud enough that you've got a good rip but just below the point where it would start clipping.

- I'm currently using Audacity for sound processing. It's automatic noise removal is great on hiss, but doesn't do squat for pops and clicks. Still, it's good enough that I don't feel a lot of need to go back and dork with the audio any further.

- I'll record one album side at a time, then clean it up, cut it up, and save the WAV files. Audacity is sufficiently unstable that it's important to save after every step.

- I'm using one of those Discwasher wet-brush things to clean albums before playing them. This seems to noticably cut down on noise.

- At some point in the future, I might want to go back and do fancier cleanup. I archive the raw WAV capture from the album side as a FLAC file. Only then do I do all the post-processing and MP3 conversion. I discard the intermediate WAV files. (This is analogous to saving the "raw" images you get out of better digital cameras as if they're your precious negatives.)

- Finally, make sure that you're digitizing at whatever the "native" rate is for your sound card. My Onkyo is 44.1KHz, native, but most Soundblasters are 48KHz. You don't want some software resampling to unnecessarily mess with your music.