Number of keywords in meta tag

I have been reading everything I can get my eyes on, about SEO. There are so many different opinions on what is best, it gets confussing.
Alot of the places I read, suggested no more then 20 keywords in your meta tag. However, if you google the keyword "web hosting" and view the source of the top few results, you'll see that alot of them use more then 20 words, bravenet uses about 40, yet ranks very high in
I saw another one that used keywords as their description, I dont mean in a sentence, I mean 1 and 2 words a time, and had a total of about 30 keywords as their description. Is this allowed, I mean is google going to see this as a bad thing? Im guessing no, since I saw this in the 3rd result of my search.

What are your thoughts on the perfect number of keywords? Do you think that we actually get penalized for using more?
And about the keywords in the description, whats your opinion on that? This whole SEO thing can be very confussing and frustrating .I was working on my keyword relevancy last night, and trying to reword my paragraphs to include all of my keywords. At one point I had an 80% revelancy. I changed 1 sentence, went back and I had a 71%. Touchy arent they!

Forgot, please post your suggestions for good websites to use for page analysis. I have been using Submit Express and Web Master Toolkit . Any better that you know of?

Most of the major search engines ignore the keywords meta tag these days because of the infamous keyword stuffing abuses of the late 90's. I have read plenty of debate about whether designers should leave out the keyword meta tags altogether. My personal view is keep them in - can't hurt and may still play some relevance in the algorithms if the keywords in the meta tag match or relate to keywords used in the body content, title tags, headers etc... In other words, don't worry about it. Concentrate on your title tag, headers and above all the main body content.

to my knowledge use max. of 90-100 to be safe, otherwise it could be harmful for your ranking in some search engines

Just worry about the title, it's the only "tag" of any importance.

I'd limit # of keywords to 10-20. google doesn't really pay attentino to meta tag though other search engines (yahoo, msn and ask) don't count meta tag in SERPs.

Many of the highest ranked sites use loads of keywords in their metatags. I agree with Chicago. The only one to worry about is the Title tag, so make sure that your keywords are in it - and at the beginning of it. e.g. If targeting Organic Chocolate call it "Organic chocolate by Company Name Ltd" instead of "Company Name Organic Chocolate".

The words in the other metatags will only count if there is no other website that has those keywords in their title or main content (fairly unlikely).