Question: Google Reader tends in my opinion to be a bit over-eager to mark posts as read - if you click on a post or scroll over the top of it it will be marked as read.

Is there a setting to control the conditions for a post being marked as read?

Answer: 
[LiquidPlanner](http://www.liquidplanner.com/) seems quite good. It has a nice feature that shows the spread of task completion times based on past performance.

The again there is always [FogBugz](http://www.fogcreek.com/FogBugz/) ;-)

Neither are free, although FogBugz does have various free for academic use options.
I've been using PivotalTracker.com and am quite happy with it.