I started using another one of Il Filosofo's plugins last week, but it only affects the WordPress admin area.  It's his Old-Style Upload plugin.  It adds the upload functionality that older versions of WordPress had.  There are configurable options, including where to upload the files and what types to accept.  The cool thing is that these options have no effect on the upload capabilities that already exist within post-writing.  The reason this is cool is because I can use the in-line upload tool to upload pictures or other files to my posts, and I can use the Old-Style Upload plugin to upload plugins to the /wp-content/plugins/ directory.  And that's exactly what I'm doing!  It's great!  I can't believe this functionality isn't already there.  I used to have to use FTP to upload new files.  What a waste of time and security! 

One change I would make to the plugin is to comment out line 146, which says $img1_name = preg_replace('/[^a-z0-9_.]/i', '', $img1_name);.  This line renames the uploaded file by taking out certain characters and symbols.  I think this is stupid, and commenting it out solves the problem.