GIMP can do everything you ask, assuming you have the fonts on your system. At least that's true for the Linux version; not sure how the windows version accesses fonts. You can add text, but as pixellany said, you can't easily change text that is already part of a flat image file. In GIMP or Photoshop, layers are your friends! You can apply transparency, build collages, all kinds of fun things.

If you need high quality text layers, you might want to give Inkscape a try. It is technically a vector graphics program, but can incorporate bitmap images like photos.

As, I mentioned earlier I use picassa photo edit ....

Thanks for ur replies....

Sorry--I should have said: "What OTHER editing SW have you tried?". Trying different applications is the only way you will really figure out what works for you.

IMO picasa is a killer app for organizing and sharing photos, but don't know what editing capabilities it has besides cropping, red-eye, and color correction. You might want to poke around the menus to see what it can do...

There are many photo editing applications for Windows at this site:

http://majorgeeks.com/downloads37.html

Some are free. Some are shareware. You can filter the choices by license and all the free ones will be in a row.

I used to use FastStone Image Viewer in Windows. Since I switched to Linux I use gThumb Image Viewer. Its basic and easy. Perhaps lacking 'cool' features but great for quick editing, resizing, cropping, and so fourth.