Killing my cable tv, questions on cleaning the crime scene

I'm going to be building an htpc within the next month to replace cable and consolidate all the media in the house. It'll hook into the livingroom hdtv.

I've been playing with various software on my computer (hulu, boxee, xbmc, wmc, zinc) for the last week or so and have settled on Zinc for the primary interface because it looks like the easiest interface for the rest of the house to use and, frankly, is a damn nice interface and looks like it will scale up wonderfully from my little 20" computer screen to the 50" plasma.

Basically, whatever I use has to be intuitive enough so my wife can pick up a remote and find some thing she wants to watch. She is NOT computer savvy by any means.

I also want to be able to supply whatever content (music and vid) I can to the rest of the house, but I realize that that's probably outside of Zinc's purvue.

And this brings a couple questions:

• Back button issue - It looks like content via hulu (and netflix according to a post here?) can't be gotten out of without escaping from full-screen -then- hitting backspace? Is there something a tad easier with a remote? Can't find much in the forums about this.
• Automatically adding new content of a favorite channel to the queue? It looks like the faves could eventually get pretty huge and scrolling through it to pick out and queue new shows could get to be rather a pain. Am I just missing a switch, or is this something worth persuing?
• Handling of local content.... uh..... er.... well.... kinda sucks. Granted it picked up all the avi's and mpg's (haven't worked with mkv's yet, tho I saw something about that in the forums here) it doesn't see or access the DVD back-ups I have (video_ts/audio_ts format) or even straight DVD playback?

I've been playing with the Applications to see if I can find an elegant solution to this (that my wife can use easily) and haven't really been able to figure something good out. Sure, I can swap out to VLC or something, but believe me, I'll only come home from work to a big screen covered in pop-ups and the wife trying to get off of a web page trying to sell her a virus scanner if I don't "spouse-proof" the set-up as much as possible. (or she'll have the media drive half-deleted, which is even worse. Married 20 years, I -know- these things...)

Anyways, local content access is important and I need to do something, if not within Zinc, then handing off to another program is fine (I guess... would love to see a "Local Content" bar on the main screen) but I'm not terribly impressed with how xbmc, wmc, or boxee handles it either. Any guidance here especially would be VERY appreciated!

Thanks much.