Jointly developed by Washington State University and Microsoft, Paint.net is intended to be a replacement for the free MS Paint software provided with all Windows operating systems.

It offers many of the powerful features found in commercial editors, including the ability to work on multiple layers, full transparent PNG support, unlimited history, and a plethora of visual effects.

An interesting feature is the way each tool window becomes transparent when covering the image. This enables better implementation of effects and is something the big image editors are currently lacking.

Adding and editing text is somewhat limited, but will hopefully be improved in later versions. You can't seem to move text around the canvas or highlight it to change individual character sizes, and it doesn't automatically assign text to a new layer.

You will need to install .NET Framework 1.1 in order to run this software (23.1MB)

Clicking the download link will take you to download page, where you can choose between the stable Release 2.0 and the beta version 2.1.