Here's what I've been doing...

After I find the image, I load it into "Irfanview." It is a little photo "viewer" program that is really great. I use it as my default viewer for all JPG's, GIF's and PNG's. It is really cool because you can point it to a directory and just press the space bar or backspace button to browse all of the images in the directory. Small program too.

This program lets you do basic edits. I use it to quickly crop, convert to greyscale and re-sample to 32 pixels high. Then I keep adjusting the brightness, contrast or sharpness with it - each time pasting into Tony's LogoEditor - until I get the right result. I use Paint (the one that comes with Windows) a little bit and use Tony's editor for the preview and the little touchups. It is not very efficient running 3 programs, but that Irfanview is such a small program and I really suck at Photoshop. Besides, it'd take up too many resources and I've already got emplode and MusicMatch running.