[Tristan Lall]

Another vote for Paint.net and Inkscape, mostly because they're free, and secondarily because they're pretty good. (I haven't actually used GIMP, so I don't have an opinion on it.)

Incidentally, I've never seen a good explanation of why Photoshop still uses a scratch disk, rather than using Windows NT's own perfectly good memory management. (A pox on archaic memory management techniques, I say.) That fact always makes me wary of what lurks within Photoshop's codebase.