Texture / Image handling whats the optimum approach

All

  Looking for a group opinion here.  There has been some write up on the new Texture loaders...are these the optimum way to go??  Yuri suggested the current implementations created double bufferimages and wrote some example code using  the following but the code excerpt was incomplete.

ImageIO.createImageInputStream(

Are people loading all textures at startup, when needed.

What are the best ways of freeing image memory when no longer used.

Are there tools with Xith that can optimize hhow the video card uses textures?? rendering options perhaps???