A friend of mine just did some work on my car's ECU for me. Various parts were added to the board.
In order to mount the new parts, he had to desolder a lot of mount holes. He used one of these, which I'd never seen before:

Old hands at the electronics game would have better, more expensive equipment for desoldering... but it's hard to beat this little guy at $10 from Radio Shack.
Before I saw him using this the only desoldering tools I knew about were braid and the spring-action pump-sucker-thing.