My understanding is that they cleaned up the magic items quite a bit. It's not just a reprint of 'all the magic items we've put out' that it seems like at first glimpse.

The WoTC board had some designer notes about catagorizing items utility and necessity and all that, something that I think went from being a 'designer use catagory' into actual player use.

I could be lying however, I haven't gamed in a month, and D&D purchaces are a low priority for me...

With the Magic Item Compendium, WotC took the opportunity to look over the magic item system / economy and shore up any weaknesses as much as possible.

The main perceived weakness they found was the prevalence of the Big Six items, which caused PCs to sell items that didn't fall into those categories (mainly simple boosters) in favor of improving them.  Another was the prevalence of just plain sucky magic items.  Stuff with opportunity costs or utility functions that no player in their right mind would spend the gp (and xp in the case of crafters) on.

So they introduced ways of adding secondary magical effects to items more cheaply, reduced costs across the board for "non-Big Six" items, and especially for those items that seemed especially expensive for their perceived utility.  That's in addition to re-listing and updating the best items they could find in the book, and creating new random treasure tables and a new "CR" type system for guidelines of magic items appropriate to PC party level to make their placement in the game easier for DMs.

Something I just discovered:  The iconic characters are actually included as the default pre-rolled characters in the Temple of Elemental Evil CRPG.

Actually, some (the main ones, sort of) of them are on Wizards' site.  It just took me a bit to find them.  mrlost pointed out how to do so, though.  They're in a section called "NPC Closeup" and are listed under generic class names, like "Wizard," "Cleric," and so forth.  Seems to be 3E stats, but it shouldn't take much to convert them to 3.5e.

Go here and scroll down to the bottom of the list to find them.

Gods, I hate navigating Wizards' site, sometimes.  

Quote from: Pierce InverarityHe who claims that Lidda is hot is just afraid of Mialee.

and hasn't taken a look at the Cladio Pozas versions of Alhandra and Vadania. (the other two aren't bad, just not as nice.