categories / taxonomy AND tags?

Hi there,

I am realtively new to Drupal, and please let me say first that I am so gratefule for all the work all you guys put into this project. Thanks to all developers!

So, here is my question:

I want a page that uses a static category structure defined by me, like

Animals
- Dogs
- Cats

Food
- Apples
- Peas

etc.

The user MUST chose one (sub-)category.

However, at the sime time I would like to enable free tagging.

So for example:

User writes an article about his dog "Lassie". He will (have to) choose Animals => Dogs.
However, tagging could be something such as " 'Lassie', 'Collies', 'bad dogs'" etc.

I tried a couple of modules but none of them seems to do what I want; CCK Taxonomy super select only allows adding ONE new tag, however I don't like the way the selection process works, personally (currently using hierarchical select).

Anyone got ANY idea how to achieve that? As I understood, the category module seems to do just that, but due to the warnings i hesistate to install it...

By th eway, I use the latest 5.x version.

Thanks for any comment!

Regards,
Robert