Thanks for all the tips and links. Will be going over all of them this weekend.

Kind of freaks me out the nothingness of all of this where if something goes wrong, you can lose it all forever.

Yesterday I downloaded Multibit. It works so much better than the wallet I downloaded about 10 months ago. My old wallet took HOURS to synchronize. Multibit took a few seconds.

Dumb newbie question: If I export the privacy key from Multibit, can I use that key with any another wallet that is not the Multibit wallet? I downloaded Multibit on two laptops. Then exported the key from one laptop and used it to access my money on the other one. It worked so that gave me a bit of a sense of security that if my hard drive crashed on one computer I could still get my money using the other one. But still confused. Is the key generated by wallet programs all you need to get your money from any wallet app as long as you have the key written down? If that is the case I feel better but still takes some faith to put any significant amount of cash out there.