Photo management software?

[Calico]

I am new to this board, so I hope I posted this to the right section.

I shoot mostly on digital, so I have many 1,000s of photos. I need an image management database to allow me to find specific photos later. I have reviewed probably 7 or 8 so far, but none seem to meet my needs.

- It must make thumbnails of the images which it *stores*. This means when I pull out the CD the photo is on, the database still can show me a preview of the image.

- It must be fully searchable. It would be nice to enter in keywords, location, date of shoot, and a few other text field. Then I could go back and search for only photos of "taxi cabs" in "New York City" shot between 5/1 - 5/31 for example.

- It must not cost a zillion dollars. This is my hobby, so I can't justify spending $500 or $800 or more on a pro package. I don't need to do accounts recievable or invoicing. I just need to manage my photos.

An added plus would be something that lets me cut CDs in some sort of protected format preventing someone from just copying the files off the disk. I think FlipAlbum Pro does this, but it does not seem to have any decent search ability (and it's stupid slow on my computer).

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated! :-D

Thanks in advance,

-May

P.S. The software must run on Win XP.