Just another vote for Wordpress. dct, you should check out the wp-cache plugin located here. It works VERY nicely at creating static pages out of your wordpress content. The ONLY trouble I've had with it is via the 'recent-links' plugin, which makes me have to delete the cache after adding one of those, or wait for the cache to expire. I've got my cache expiry set to 1 hour, and usually time-delay my posts anyway, so that's an easy way to do it to stagger my content, which is usually all prepped the night before.
I did, it didn't help me though due to my traffic pattern and frequency of comments (which I didn't think was that high). My provider said it reduced my resource usage by about 5% but at peak times I was still using 40% memory and CPU on a shared machine. I've heard it can work very well for some sites though.