I would like to hear from an experimental physicist who could help
recommend a list of the minimum equipment needed to repeat some of the
"classic" QM experiments, for example the dual-slit experiment with
single-photon reception, or an interferometer setup (demonstrating
interaction-free measurements).

I know the type of parts involved, what I would like to have is
recommendations on actual names/model numbers of the beamsplitters,
laser, mirror and detectors used in a proven setup - preferably of the
sort you can buy at ThorLabs, Edmund Optics etc.

[[Mod. note -- Paper describing experiments of this type for university
(student) physics labs are often published in the American Journal of
Physics; experiments suitable for K-12 (student) physics labs are often
described in The Physics Teacher.  These journals' web pages can be
found at
  http://scitation.aip.org/ajp/
  http://scitation.aip.org/tpt/
respectively.
-- jt]]

There is one aspect I would like to ask about in addition though. In
the
cited paper, the setup uses a downconversion crystal and an additional
photomultiplier device to be able to separate the "signal" photons
from background photons and dark current in the interferometry
experiment (one of the downconverted photons go directly to a PMD
and the other go through the interferometer setup).

Is this always necessary ? There are modern devices with extremely
low dark count (< 50 count/s) and if built in a cage system with tubes
the background is reduced very much as well, and I'm sure I have seen
setups doing interferometry illustrations without the photon
"tagging"..

I guess it depends on how "single-photonish" you want the end result
of the experiment to be? I.e. without tagged photons you can build up
a
similar statistical diagram of fringes out of discrete photon counts
but
you might not get the same "impact" on the experimenter..

(obviously there are a lot of more advanced experiments which need
the entangled downconverted photons - I just thought it seemed like
overkill in this situation to illustrate these effects)

Also - any suggestions on the qualitative differences between classic
photomultiplier devices, avalanche photo diodes and a new device I
found while googling at: http://www.micro-photon-devices.com/mpd.aspx
which is supposed to feature single-photon sensitivity without the
drawback of breaking at strong light exposure for example ?