I just bought a powershot A610, excellent and flexible camera for the money, in my opinion. Best thing is no noticeable shutterlag under good circumstances, even in dark environments the auto-focus is pretty quick.

To get pictures out of the camera I had to use the Canon software, as the camera doesn't show up as a removeable drive as my ols camera does (Benq) or MP3 players and USB sticks.

I tried, but Picasa doesn't see the camera, good old Irfanview will allow you to select the Canon Twain driver and to use that to get the images in your PC though.

As it so happens, I'm on Win 2kpro on an old, tired machine (450MHz PII, 192MB Ram) but still everything is sufficiently stable and quick not to be a real pain.