I have alway used sh404sef to make seo and user friendly urls, but this component is always breaking other things on the site. Does anyone have a better way of changing the urls? It really seems like joomla 2.5 would have addressed this issue.
You can have pretty good control over the URLs by altering menu structures and alias's, but if you want to get real specific, you need a URL manager like SH404SEF.
Other good alternatives are AceSEF and MijoSEF. The developer that wrote AceSEF just split off from JoomAce and started Mijosoft. Right now, the two extensions are virtually identical because they were forked, but if you had to choose, I'd probably lean towards MijoSEF since he (Dennis) was the original developer. Both offer free versions that give you a good idea of how they operate.
The interface isn't quite as nice as SH404SEF, but you'll get the hang of it pretty quick.