Best free editing program for Windows 7?

Please offer advice: My company has replaced my trusty, but now slow XP laptop. It had Photoshop CS installed and I asked for something similar on the Windows 7 replacement. Either our license expired or they won't pay for an upgrade. My work needs are pretty light and I won't be processing underwater photos on this machine. The IT department told me to pick something free and they will install it. Any recommendations are greatly appreciated.

GIMP

Freeware and very powerful, but need a bit of learning as it is different from Photoshop.

http://www.gimp.org/windows/

Chris

Gimp is quite painful (at least to me). Paintnet works OK. A lot depends on how much editing you need to do. Picasa is also OK.

Bill

For good free light editing and organizing I suggest either Picassa or Windows Essentials. The Photo Gallery and Movie apps in Essentials are quite simple and effective with solid exposure corrections tools. I really like that you can directly upload to Facebook from these apps.

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-live/essentials-home

Thanks for the suggestions!

You might want to look at RawTherapee, too. I took a quick look at it and thought it promising.

http://rawtherapee.com/

definitely GIMP you can find some info here: http://www.gimp.org/windows/
Now i use the image editing software PhotoStudio, it have bother versions as mac photo editor and win photo editor. Functions as remove image background, add photo effects, clear blurry photos and so forth are all allowed.