I'd go with the Radeon 8500LE, it's generally faster then the Ti200 is a much more well rounded product, with a better feature set.
<< The Radeon 8500LE's around $100 I've seen are not ATi brand but third parties that prolly aren't using that high quality ram and plus there is some debate whether the quality on the "Powered by ATi" cards as well >>
Presntly there are only two third party manufacturers actually making R8500 boards, those being Club3D, and Gigabyte.... with Hercules rumored to start within the next few months. All other third party R8500's are manufactured by ATi to the respective companies specs and re-sold to the third party for branding and re-sale.
Hence the 2D visual quality, and quality of manufacture should be consistent with that of ATi's own cards. I'd be wary of Club3D, but Gigbyte's models seem to be of respectable quality.
From what I've seen the third party vendors typically use 4.0ns, 3.8ns, or 3.6ns DDR SDRAM.
With the exception of Club3D I'd feel quite confident purchasing a R8500LE, and I certainly have no qualms with recommend or selling them.
The R7500 is another matter altogether though, with a number of third parties selling R7500's at much lower clockspeeds then ATi's models, and a few even using SDR SDRAM.