Yeah Ed,
Give GIMP a try. I bought a $19.95 CD that installed X Windows, GIMP, and I think OroborOSX. GIMP works really very well, except that going through a few Apple Mac OS X updates did "something" to the X Windows fonts. I can't type any text into my images using GIMP. I bought the CD because I did not know how to install X Windows and all the dependencies on my own, like most Mac users I needed an installer. But it works very well, a little over kill for some things, and fairly stable. It's crashed a few times. If you do get it and install it, it requires its own swap VM file; max it out to 128MB, you'll use every bit of it when you start working with large pictures.