Best Freeware Image Editor for Windows

I used to have a work at home licence for Ulead Photoimpact, but don't anymore.
Which image editor would you recommend?
It has to be free and it has to support GIF and PNG.
I read somewhere that the GIMP doesn't support GIF :(

It also has to be more feature packed than MS Paint :bigyello:
GIF/JPG optimisers would be a definite plus :thumb:

The Gimp does support GIFs but the colour palette has to be set to indexed instead of RGB.

the reason that the GIMP doesnt support GIF is due to patents on the LZW compression algorithm used in GIF images. the GIMP does support PNG images, which are much better than GIF.

the GIF patent expired and wasn't renewed.