I have a customer who wants to hide certain content from users outside the United States and Canada. I'm leaning toward using IP address to determine country location. I am considering purchasing IP2Location tables (www.ip2location.com) subscription. But thought I'd ask around first to see if anyone else has a more brilliant, easier, cheaper, way?

Hiya Levi and congrats on 100 posts! hehe

Check out Website Access Manager and see if that works for you. It can do blocks by many things including IP addresses and it's pretty easy to use.
http://www.coffeecup.com/website-access-manager/

Scroll down the page a bit to get a good idea of all the things you can do with it

http://www.parkansky.com/china.htm

http://www.wizcrafts.net/chinese-blocklist.html