Hey, you got it right in take one :o)

If you ever want a photoshop-esque program, I highly recommend the open-source GIMP (Windows .exe).

If you've never worked with layers before, it's a new world, but also with many more possibilities than MS Paint etc. offers.

There's a GIMP comm on DW, gimp_gate - I've made a couple of tutorials that might get you started on how GIMP works:

How-to: Simple text shadow in GIMP
How-to: Creating an icon similar to this, *points to icon*, in Gimp

I like to think my tutorial skills are better than my icon-making skills, at least :oD