Being the impatient individual that I am I couldn't wait for santa (I'd have been waiting a long time, what with me being really bad this year) so I bought a Canon powershot a40.
Bit heavier than the competition but feels very solid.
Only 2 meg ccd but at top res is good enough for 7x5 prints and you've got some manual control over the settings and a good x3 zoom. All in all quite happy with the results for just over £200.
Mind you if you've got windows 98 the drivers on the disc don't work (half the files are missing) so you have to download them from Canon's web site. XP worked out of the box though.