If you have purchased a Minolta scanner or an Epson 1200 Photo printer then you will probably also have Photoshop 5 LE included in the package. Photoshop is the renowned photo editing package but the latest full version (v5.5) can cost around £500 in the UK (only once seen for £225 at a British Computer Fair). It is expensive to upgrade from version 5 LE to 5.5, costing around £150 to go from version 5 LE to the full version, and another £150 to go from v5 (full version only) to v5.5.
Photoshop does nearly everything you will want to do, and a lot of tools and features that you will probably never use for straight Photography. It is versatile but very complex and will take a lot of time to learn how to use it properly.
For those on a lot lower budget (around £100) I can recommend Ulead PhotoImpact which I used for many years before obtaining Photoshop. It is a lot easier to use, with multiple layers and multiple undo's (the latter only available on Photoshop 5 and above). It does not use Colour Matching Profiles like Photoshop, but can produce a very good picture, as long as you correctly adjust the gamma correction (within PhotoImpact). A friend at the local camera club always recommends Micrografix Picture Publisher Picture Publisher.
Unfortunately I cannot recommend PaintShopPro 5. It is cheap and easy to use with many similar functions to Photoshop and PhotoImpact, but on my system the preview print screen was a different colour picture to the image on the editing screen! The prints were the same as the print preview, which meant I could not rely on the image colour whilst editing. A serious defect for a package of this type. Please let me know if you have tried version 6 and this problem has been fixed, or if you have had a similar experience.