Okay, here's a general "starter kit" to make for yourself - this is just an idea starter, and you're bound to get ideas from looking at this.

The main thing to notice is the "bracket" (lower right). This is your connecting device for ANY hand-held flash to a light stand. It has a hole to shove the umbrella bar through, so you can have diffusion.

There are several types of umbrellas from standard silver, to satin, to shoot-through, to Apollos, to Softlighters - which is an umbrella with a giant "sock" in front to diffuse it even more - it's the poor-man's softbox. I've owned a few of them, and loved them, but what eventually impresses clients more is a soft box, so I have replaced them all. Umbrellas cost anywhere from $15 to over $100.

So a basic kit laid out here (combo of new and ebay purchased) would be around $350 per light - and that's a flash, on a stand, with a radio slave trigger, with the bracket and an umbrella. The Vivitar 285 (top left) is a trusty thing that never freakin dies! Runs off of batteries, so buy a lot, or as you can afford it, you can buy Quantum brick batteries and the appropriate adapting cable and you can fire this thing for hours without getting low.

you can get lower cost stands, lower cost (or find better deals on ebay) flashes, and there are MANY radio slaves that you could find cheaper on ebay as well - Quantum Radio Slave 4i comes to mind - great systems, but be aware they are frequency specific - when you find a Freq. B sender, you need a Freq. B receiver. Bound to find these for cheap as well, and just like the Pocket Wizard, the sender has a local connection, as well as a radio sender - so with a cable, you can set off one nearest the camera without having to buy a 2nd receiver - get it?

I've started with something like this (2 285s with umbrellas, and a Metz 45 for the Softlighter as a main), and there are plenty of wedding shooters using this system as well. As you can find another $350-ish, you can set up another light kit.

I've never used the microsync products, but they look like they'd work just fine.

I'd stay away from infra-red triggers and optical slaves in general - regular and bright daylight may (and WILL for optical) render them useless, and they can't fire around corners, or see from a flash that's behind them (useless in large buildings where you're in FRONT of the flash shooting a group, get it?).

With $900, you could actually start with 3 lights - 1 of which uses a local connection cable to the sending unit (saving you from buying a 3rd sender/receiver) - did that make sense?

Hope this helps - lemme know if you want some more ideas.
-Lew ;-)