John, thanks for the page of links. Definitely a good place to start. And thanks for the info on file corruption. I suspected that "never seen a corrupted project" was a little much to hope for, but I hoped maybe Adobe had made it bulletproof in the Pro product.
In Elements, I had my preferences set to keep the prior 99 versions of a project, so hitting "Save" every couple of minutes was a fairly safe way to ensure either corruption or idiocy on my part would lose limited work. In theory, any way - after adopting my workflow, I never had a corrupted project.... knock wood.