personally, i like photoshop cs2 best (waaah, i haven't upgraded to cs3 yet....whatever). i don't know that everybody would consider it reasonably priced. although there are cheaper ways to get it...*COUGH*piracy*COUGH*....shhhh....
what a confusing conversation this has turned into. anyways, hypothetically speaking...one might find such programs from places like the pirate bay or some other bittorrent trackers...
But I would hope that this "pirate bay" would have viruses attached to it's stolen programs so that these terrible people, who would consider infringing upon a copyright, would get what's "coming to them". So, are they 100% clean?
i can't really attest to how clean the programs are from that particular location seeing that it's a public bittorrent tracker, so there may be a certain amount of risk involved...but a private tracker, such as pisexy is pretty much a completely safe thing...the only problem with the private trackers is that you have to catch them during an open sign-up period (they keep a limited amount of members to keep things running smoothly).
not really sure, but if you want, i'll send you a message if i see open sign ups anytime soon...i guess if there's any other questions just send me a message so we don't have to hijack this discussion with naughty piracy any further. ;)
oh yeah, you may want to look at the gimpshop program (GIMP standing for "GNU Image Manipulation Program"). i haven't used it, but it's supposed to be similar to photoshop...except it's free, and open source. so it may be worth checking out. hope this has been at least somewhat helpful.