sharepoint webparts

not to be confused with asp2.0 webparts, which I've found easy to use and tagged in a few APIs to already and do some other fun stuff, but anyway...

sharepoint webparts I've discovered are really annoying and difficult to create, top to bottom. I've tried my best to find something, ANYTHING useful out there on the web to walk me through the first few attempts and nothing I've found so far is decent enough to start with. Devx had something that looked promising, 6 pages, with pictures, but fell short of working, MS doesn't have anything thats particularlly useful and the two books I have (Sharepoint Services inside and out and some other one that I don't have right here) haven't been very ...progressive. I think my problem might be that I've learned just about everything in vstudio2005 and not 2003 where all this is to be written.

So has anyone found or done -sharepoint- webparts recently that can give me some kind of direction or example or something to go on?