Right now I have Paintshop Pro 7 and 9. I love paintshop. The program loads initialy very fast, and loads plugins and auto shapes as you need them. I just got 9 a while ago, and I fell in love imediatley. What I want to know, is what do you like to use for image maniuplation, or image creation? Is photoshop that much better?

I've used
Photoshop 6&7 ( i think)
Paint shop pro (3-like 7 or something)
Corel draw (8)
Gimp(1&2)

I definately like photoshop the best, but I'd take gimp 2 over the rest, just because it's free and pretty much just as good.

Incidently, there's another gimp thread in the lounge.

A tool is a tool. I like to think, like Robert de Niro in Ronin, that you just use the best tool for the job at hand.
In the case of paint software, I happen to have worked with Photoshop for the last few years, whereas I was used to work with Paint Shop and Painter before that.
I use Photoshop because that's the tool I know the best, but I love Painter when it comes to more "artsy" work.
To be honest at this point I just use Photoshop most of the time because I just couldn't be bothered learning another program (initially I _hated_ the whole Layers concept, but I learned to appreciate its advantages)

The real question would be which software do you prefer, for a given task. Methinks. :)