Needed: Advice on Film Scanning, Or Website Which Has This Advice

I just got a new Hewlett Packard S20 film scanner. As you probably know it
scans at 2400 dpi. As such, it's not quite up to the likes of Minolta's
Dimage Scan III (2800 dpi) or the nice Nikon Coolscans like the LS-4000 etc
(if I got my model-numbers correct). But what I've read leads me to believe
it's not bad for a $100 2400 dpi scanner.

What I need is this, and again--if you guys know a website which is
excellent for this, good enough and I appreciate any tips whether website
based or newsgroup-comments based:

(1) How to scan to be able to make prints using the scanned images instead
of the negative (or slide). I realize that a 2400 dpi will probably only do
up to an 8x10 no larger. But I need some guidance, as I scanned a slide 2400
dpi and made an 8x6 of it. I thought it looked terrible. The dark areas
looked very grainy to me, and the rest not so sharp.

(2)How to keep film grain from showing up. Some of the scans I do are so
well-defined the film grain shows up, even on 100-speed film. How do I deal
with this?

(3)Dust & scratch clean-up. I realize the HP doesn't have IDE (?) for dust &
scratch; in fact, even the Minolta DImage Scan III doesn't (the Nikons,
others do). I tried Polaroid Dust & Scratch but it was worthless on my
TIFFs. It worked better on JPEGs.

(4)Speaking of JPEGs and TIFFs, I have been scanning the "crucial" ones at
2400 dpi in TIFF format to have the highest quality. Is this necessary, or
is JPEG good enough? (For website-based images, I've been scanning at 600dpi
and saving in JPEG).

Thanks a lot. Again, if the tips you provide are website-based, that's fine.

PS--I've already been to scantips.com but haven't found these particular
answers--yet anyway.

LRH