>I'm also interested in any other telephony tools out there so if you've used any of them, please tell me about it (which tool, did it work, was it well documented, how was the tech support, etc.)

Well, I've no experience, but friends of me were using Voice Sys, from
Stylus Innovation....

Visit the site:

http://www.stylus.com/

They have VBX, 32 OCX and DLL versions