Thank you for this David. I think this might be what I am looking for.
Thank you to everybody who has given advice. Its grea to have a "safe haven" for beginners.
You're very welcome.
Your question caused me to think about your workflow as an alternative for importing images into Lightroom, too. I kind of like the idea of dragging images from a quick, fast viewer like FastStone into Lightroom. One could easily sort through the obvious winners/losers and drag just the good ones into Lightroom. It keeps Lightroom less cluttered. Also, you can see and group images by subject in Faststone and then drag them as a group into Lightroom making tagging in Lightroom easier.
I didn't know you could drag into Lightroom, so thank you too for educating me!