ahh yeah, that would be great to switch between em. I prefer to play on survival... but use creative for experimenting with engineering projects and discovering physics glitches
I havn't messed with minecarts since notch "broke" everything with the glitch physics update/fix. Starting to get the urge to work on minecarts or a mechanism...
bukkit is an alternative server to the mojang distributed one. It's major advantage is the ability to run a wide swath of plugins, from ones that tweak minor irritants, to drastically changing the game play completely to ones that grant or deny permissions and commands to groups of people. *MANY* public servers you see on the net are running bukkit, due to the latter.
I used to manage a bukkit server my friend set up in his house a while back (not enough bandwidth in my house), I'm quite familiar with op commands (now lets see how many I remember, lol)
BIG drawback to bukkit is that its developed by an outside group, which means they're always a step behind mojang for pumping out stable releases. Right now it's got beta releases out for 1.2.3 and the last
(rock solid) stable release was 1.1
What it generally comes down to however is
if it aint broke, don't bother fixin it!. unless you've got a burning desire to tinker with plugins, K.I.S.S. always works the easiest
... only reason I had asked was because of the chunk errors you mentioned - I had experienced them in bukkit before and was curious if there was link there. seems like the answer to that is no!