Once you find a good paper or two (and/or the academic literature's relevant buzzwords for your issue), you can span out through the citations for quite a while. "Introduction / Survey of ..." papers (e.g. http://archives.cs.iastate.edu/documents/disk0/00/00/02/04/0...) exist mainly for the bibliography. Also, when you find someone whose name keeps coming up, look for their faculty page, e.g. Andrew Appel's (http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~appel/papers/).
For papers that don't have .pdf or .ps files cached on Citeseer (due to primary hosting behind the ACM's paywall) try searching on Google Scholar and clicking "X other versions". Typically, the ACM is the first result, but faculty pages have publicly visible copies.
At least for Mathematics, Physics and Computer Science the authors often have a working draft on their homepage. Alternatively, and in all fields, you can just write a letter or email to the author asking for an electronic copy.
Then you could befriend someone in a university---just ask around on HN, I am sure somebody will step forward and agree to download you articles from behind paywalls every once in a while. Or often just joining the library of your local university is good enough.
Alternatively, just emailing and asking the author for a pdf might work (if you're comfortable with that).
I really miss being a student and having wide access to all kinds of journals. The professional societies (like IEEE computer) do provide some access to some journals, but the coverage is so limited. One would have join all of them to get the same access that a university student has.
For finding good papers, use Citeseerx or Google scholar or Microsoft Academic Search. One popular metric is to look at the # citations :)
2. type the name of the paper
3. click the all x versions-link
4. get the PDF