Welcome. I've been around for about a week and the basic strategy seems to be to find a popular/common model and buy the same one. If you read the forums a bit you can also get a sense of which suppliers are currently doing a good job by delivering high quality frames and customer service. Seems like Carbonda is hot right now. There used to be a good contact on here that people would use ('Peter') with predictable results but that currently doesn't exist.

I'm looking for the same thing as you and i've narrowed my search to:

http://www.carbonda.com/mountain/mtb/97.html or another one of their HT's or something from ICAN. Let me know what you figure out.