Picture Tools in Windows 7?

As much as I am enjoying Windows 7, one can't help but wonder why Microsoft stopped including an email client and why the have not updated the paint program...
While MS Paint allows for minor photo correction like crop and resize, it's not all that effective.  It's similar to the cigar box I had when I was a kid, you know the one... it held my crayola crayons, some kid safe scissors, a pencil or 2 and gigantic pink eraser. While that was fine when I was 4, it just doesn't work for me today.
My computer is fast, my screen is wider than most of paper sheets I had, and the pictures... well, they speak for themselves yet sometimes, I want modify them a bit more than trimming off the edges or making them larger or smaller.  Windows Photo Viewer is nice tool that is included with Windows 7 but it doesn't allow you to resize or modify your pictures aside from rotating them in 90 degree increments, burning them to a disk or attaching pictures to an email but even then, if it's a raw photo from your camera, it's likely to large to send via email.. Not that it wouldn't go, it's the file size being more than a megabyte that would slow it down, takes up more bandwidth, makes it harder to see the full image on most monitors etc etc.
So, how are we supposed to manage pictures with the base install of Windows 7, doesn't matter which version of windows 7, not even ultimate has anything better than paint and photo viewer.  You have a couple of options and the range in cost from free, to a few hundred dollars.  Which method for resizing pictures is free you ask..?
It's not actually a resizing method at all - it is done before you even take the picture with your camera. While today's digital cameras can take some very detailed photographs, the compromise is in how many of them you can take and store on your camera at one time.  Granted, you can buy additional storage for your camera in the way of memory cards, you are still limited to how many will fit on a given card. This of course may or may not be an issue depending on how many pictures you might take on a given outing with your camera.
The limitations are due to file size, those high quality photos you take require quite a bit of storage space and are also quite large in (physical) size when viewed.  The simple method for resizing them is in the camera itself, simply turn down the settings to something that is more manageable like 1024 or 640.  The method for doing this will vary from camera to camera but will allow for you to store more photos on a given storage media as well as providing an easy method for sending those pictures by email as they will already be at a more friendly file and viewing size. So much for the free method as it does have it's drawbacks such as detail levels in those pictures, for example, the lower resolution settings won't allow for the better printouts on you photo printer - ying and yang my friend, shake hands and work it out.  An alternative is to leave the camera at higher setting and then crop the excess and resize what is left.  This won't produce the best results but, might be better than using the camera at the lower settings, I suggest you try both methods and see what works best for you.

The not so free solutions require the purchase of additional software. Depending on how detailed you want your resulting photographs to be can reflect on how much money you might need to spend.  There are a multitude of photo editing applications available  and some are even included with your new camera; Kodak for example has some nice software that allows for photo management including editing, online storage, email, and a few other things at no extra charge.  Last time I checked, it can be downloaded for free as well.  Beyond that, a very nice set of options are available from Adobe including photoshop elements, photoshop, and many other graphic editing / creation software applications.  While they can be expensive, they are also limited in the sense that they only edit particular types of graphics files.

I mention this because in the larger versions of MS Office 2003 and 2007, you also get MS Office Picture Manager which has some nice photo editing and management software.  So for about the same cost, you can get MS Office - Word, Excel, Outlook, Publisher and more. If you are not wanting to do much more than resize, tweak the colors, email and manage pictures, and you have a need for the MS office suite of applications, this might be a good solution.