If you want to use any sort of "miniatures table" element, I recommend MapTool. It has a lot of nice features in it that you can completely ignore if you don't want to be bothered by them. That's a critical point for me -- some programs have a bunch of bells and whistles, but if I HAVE to learn how to use them in order to use the program at all, that's a disincentive when I just want to get things rolling right now.

I've slacked on posting the logs of the text portion, but I've been keeping screen shots (with an "observer" account) of scenes of the maps as I mess around with them. I suppose I should make a point of getting those online to make my point. ;)