Thanks to everyone for their advice and stories. It seems the popular choice is Cisco with a close second of foundry. Even a nice mention of Dell switches. Most people had nothing good to say about HP. (phew.. glad I asked you all) I completely forgot abt Foundry so they are my next stop! Oddly no one mentioned 3com. I don't know if that's good or bad.
The sad part is I hate Cisco. Well I hate IOS. It is the most counter intuitive interface known to man. We currently have several 3550's and one that is still partially brain dis-functional after a "senior network engineer" at a hosting facility got a-hold of it to "help out".
To be honest I miss Ascend. Nice interfaces with actual menu's and interface for those of us who don't need 50 ways to do something or only find they need to touch their switches once a year for upgrades or whatever. You could at least wander through the menu's to figure out/remind yourself what to do.
If anyone makes a switch with this type of menuing that can actually pass lots of bits well and is not a consumer toy. I want to know :)
Nortel? 3Com aren't too bad. From memory Nortel are actually better at higher throughput levels. Nortel has a GUI Device Management system via SNMP which is pretty good. They also have intuitive HTTP access for most things and the console gives you a menu or a commandline option. Look at the Nortel 5510/5520/5530 switches for Gigabit throughput... Mark.