awful night and indoor pics-need new camera help...

[Groucho]

I've seen you say this before, Groucho, about the low light performance of Fuji. What about image stabilization vs picture stabilization? I don't grasp the difference. How will the Fugi do with my lower light action shots? How will the Fuji do when I'm not steady at high zoom or when I'm bouncing along on a ride or bus? Thank you for your help!

Fuji's "picture stabilization" is mostly a marketing term. It just means speeding up the shutter.

To put it simply... taking a picture is just capturing light. In order to get the exposure you want, you need to capture a certain amount of light. There's three ways to adjust how much your camera captures light. (Not counting using a flash.)
Aperture: This is how large the opening is that lets in light.
Shutter speed: How long the shutter stays open
ISO: how sensitive the sensor (or film) is

Changing each one has its advantages and disadvantages:
Large aperture can lead to a slightly less sharp photo and a shallow depth of field (the latter not so obvious in a point-n-shoot)
Slow shutter speed leads to blurring from hand shake and the movement of whatever you're shooting
Very sensitive ISO settings lead to noise and loss of detail

What image stabilization does is mechanically move an element of the camera (the sensor itself or a part of the lens) to cut down on hand shake, allowing you to use a longer shutter speed without as much blurring. However, that doesn't help you when you're photographing a moving object, which will still blur.

A larger sensor (as found in the Fujis that have the SuperCCD HR sensors) allows a higher sensitivity without as much noise. A larger sensor has really no drawbacks except that it's physically larger, so it may require a larger camera body. (That's why you can't put a DSLR-sized sensor in your average pocket camera - it just won't fit.)

There's an eternal debate about IS vs larger sensor. I think that, everything else being equal, larger sensor always wins - but of course, things are never that simple in the real world, and there are enough differences in competing cameras that there's never a clear winner.

The newest Fuji long-zoom camera does have true IS - however, its sensor is a good bit smaller than in the previous-generation Fuji long-zoom, although still slightly larger than in competing long-zoom cameras. So as far as I know, there is still no long-zoom (10x+) point-n-shoot with true image stabilization and a large (1/1.8" or bigger) sensor.