My list of programs...
Photoshop CS2 for drawing everything
Gif Movie Gear for putting together gif files
MS paint is fine...but you need to work on becoming used to building your own palletes with the program which, personally, I never bothered with. It was too much of a pain and photoshop makes it so much easier
My combo is perfectly suited for my needs....animating :P
Photoshop for viewing each frame layer over layer and gif movie gear for bringing it to life
I really don't have any experience in any other programs so I can't really judge Photoshop vs PaintShopPro