For a viewer one of the easiest is getting a light table from an art/sewing store. Many inexpensive ones have enough area to lay out 25+ slides, or about a typical roll of films worth. Sort of an inexpensive version of the units they sold in the 70's that let you view a bunch of slides at once.
The light table can also be used upside down on top of the scanner to scan a pretty wide range of transparencies. It works well for slides and film negatives, not as well for glass negatives or glass lantern slides.
Cleaning the slides is something I'd avoid unless they were pretty bad. The emulsion side would be the hardest, the film side would be easy, but can also be scratched fairly easily.
Slides were usually kept in the boxes, or in pages so they are typically clean. Bad storage will cause a whole bunch of problems. Really bad ones can be removed from the mount cleaned and remounted, some history might be lost, as most mounts have some info on them even if it's only the sort of film and date. But if it's bad enough to remount that's not the main concern.
Steve B
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