>I know there is a TON of tech savvy minds on this board.
So I am in the quest for a really good Windows based address book and
wondering what you may have found.

you might check openoffice.org ... it's a freebie clone of ms office
... and has a spreadsheet,
presentation program, database, drawing program, something they call
Formula.
and it's free. runs on linux or mac or windows.
might be able to use the database program to hold the address book.

my favorite 'old program' was PCFile, by jim button. really neat.
sadly, nobody carried it into the later windows versions. but it was
great on DOS. :)

good luck!
unca joel