A few answers for you and thanks for the posts.

Log shipping can impact the reports run on a seconday server. If you are restoring frequently, then either users will be kicked off or need to be. This is probably best suited for batch restores, like a series of restores once every 4 or 5 hours to allow users to work on the db in between. In an environment where you want to minimize data loss and are moving logs every 1-5 minutes, reporting probably isn't going to work well.

I think log shipping will work with Workgroup, but I don't believe it will work with Express. If you have a passive server receiving the logs, you shouldn't need a license for it, so I'd use a 2nd copy of Workgroup.

As far as the regular backup strategy. with log shipping you don't do the backups with the primary server. Since all logs are sent to the remove server(s), that is all you need. Be sure you maintain a copy of those logs somewhere in case you have issues with the secondary.

Database mirroring is the "hot" technology now and a high point of SQL Server 2005. Therefore it's being pushed. It supposedly is very stable, but you need to test it and if you are not using SQL Native Client or a version of ADO.NET that supports it, you cannot get automatic failover. DM is essentially transactional log shipping, moving over changes almost like transactional replication, at least that's what it looks like, and applying them to the remote database. We may set it up here at some point and do some testing, but for now if you can't duplicate hardware and test well, I'd stay away. Course if you can't do that then lots of your DR/HA plans are a mess.

On reporting. I like the idea of two secondary servers, one for DR/HA, one for reporting. It does depend on your needs. If you can tolerate slightly stale data, like 1/2 a day or something, delay the restores on one server and then complete them all overnight or during lunch. This gives you a fairly recent copy of the data good for most people.

The Database mirroring/periodic snapshots works, but it has outages as well. Just like log shipping.

If you need realtime reporting, with fairly recent data then replication is your best choice. Move the data needed to another server or 2 and share the load between them.