Canon EOS range
Well, there's your first mistake.
Kidding. A lot of people get real religious about cameras and I've found it helps to not restrict yourself to a specific make. How manual do you want it to be? Will you settle for manual focus? My favorite for learning SLR was my old Minola X700. You could beat that camera and it refused to die. That, and its cheap, the optics are decent, etc.