Thanks for the replies. The panasonic T210 seems like a decent mix of features without costing way too much. It has wireless networking built in so it will stream from anywhere in the house, and supposedly they put a fast enough processor inside it that the image quality and responsiveness of the player is much better than the cheapo ones.
I think I can get it for about $175 through AAFES... That's what I'm leaning towards right now although if the BX has a cheapo one for well under $100 I might go for that instead. I really should wait until the thanksgiving and christmas sales, but we need a player now, not 2 months from now.
Plus if I was going to go for a console game, I'd get an xbox 360 with kinect. The kinect system is amazing, good enough that it might be the catalyst I need to get back into programming. A kinect plus GPS plus netbook would probably make a great basis for one heck of an augmented reality system. So maybe I'll play around with that as a way to get back into programming.