>> Would I need any special tools?
>Hot-air rework station and vacuum pick-up tools are nice,
>but cost a lot (it is on my Cristmas wish list).

A hotair rework unit is almost essential for doing any component removal.
For two leaded components like resistors, caps and diodes a soldering iron
that has two heated tips is ideal, but pretty well anything else needs hot
air. Someone did post a link here some time back on modifying a cheap radio
Shack desoldering tool into a hot air blower, but a quick scan of my saved
links doesn't find it.

I did find this link http://members.lycos.nl/anthonyvh/index.php?page=smd
which was described as a tutorial about soldering SMD devices with a normal
iron. haven't checked if the page is still up though.

Also in the essential tools, I would recommend a head mounted magnifier such
as an Optivisor or similar, tweezers, - especially the sort with the
crossover tips that are normally closed, which will save much cursing as
components are much less likely to go flying than the normally open sort,
and they are invaluable for removing components when heating with a hot air
gun. Get a reel of the finest solder you can find, and some nice fine tips
for your soldering iron, although people such as the Seattle Robotics group
have a web page where they talk of using a largish tip (Russells influence
is catching ;)) with lots of solder and wiping across multi pin ICs to
solder the pins. Some solder wick helps clean up.

Another item - make sure you have a well lit area to work in. I think this
is one aspect where you almost cannot have a too bright working area. It
does need to be evenly lit, rather than spot lit though.

Essentially all you need is some practice. If you can get a PCB, such as one
out of an old video recorder or similar item with SMD components, and play
with soldering and removing them, you will find that it isn't too bad at
all.

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