I need to put a image/photo program on my computer. I just want a general purpose program. I am looking for suggestion on what would be best. Thanks for your help.
Could you make yourself any more clear? For displaying photos I'd suggest IrfanView with its ability to use colour managment. For post-process, only ones I really can recommend are lightroom and photoshop as those are the ones I have years of experience, but for general purposes, they are bit overkill. I've heard alot of good things about googles Picasa, but then again I havent tried all the free photo viewers, but it has integrated photoviewing, editing (very minimal though) and uploading them to your google albums, so that's what I would recommend probably.
For a program like photoshop I would suggest gimp. For panoramas use hugins it plugs into gimp pretty seamlessly. For HDR images use qtpfsgui, it's awesome. There are free tutorials on the gimp site.
I gave hugins a test last week.. it's an awesome bit of freeware. I'm not hot on graphic design and even I managed to stitch 11 pics together at my 3rd attempt.
You should really try out qtpfsgui and make a few hdr images it will blow your mind how cool some of that stuff can be and all done for free. On their dl site there is a tutorial on how to take the shot and then use their software. If you have an slr camera it is a simple manuever. Check it out though.
