Have you ever tried using Google Docs? I've been writing my manuscript using it for the past couple of weeks now, and I find it fairly effective as a basic text editor. It's simple, which could be good or bad depending on your requirements, but it never crashes and it partially allays my constant nervousness that one day my old, old Powerbook is just going to give up and take my life with it.

I also have to say, as you've mentioned it so much David, that the function of storing "versions" in the cloud is pretty impressive. You can go back and retrieve the document "as-was" at any stage.

If this sounds like a Google press release, it's not supposed to. From my experimentation, it's not a fully featured word processor - but its not bad as a free tool.