[gregbradley]

Mike have you ever tried Noise Ninja? You can lassoo out the areas you don't want handled by it, even the stars if you were really tricky with Photoshop.

It does a good job and minimal smoothing.

There is a free trial. I think its a great plug in so you get the best of both worlds, keep your faint smudgies (or is that budgies?) and your noise is reduced (to some degree it is not an ultimate solution).

I did that on your image and it got rid of the noise at a slight cost of some of the dimmer stars colour saturation but not the brighter ones (that could be improved by careful masking of all the stars rather than the brighter ones that I did). It turned out well.I can post it if you wish. It didn't lose any faint fuzzies.

Greg.