I mentioned this in another post so I'd better elaborate.
I've been experimenting with a trial download of Elements 4.0. It has some very good upgrades from 2.0 that I've been using since last summer. However, a warning is in order if you want to try it. This might apply to 3.0, too, but I haven't used it to know.
It has a browser function that keeps track of your photos using a set of indexes. There are a lot of ways you can organize them and switch back and forth between views. It's really a very handy function but it has a quirk. Once you index your photos, you MUST do all downloading from the camera, moving and deleting files and folders, and all other photo handling from within Elements. DO NOT do any of this from the Windows picture viewer or My Computer. That will mess up your indexing and really mess with Elements ability to find anything. I had a MAJOR disaster this way. I deleted an empty folder using Windows while Elements was open. That caused a major crash in Elements index and it moved 3300 photos from their various folders into the one I was trying to delete. I don't think I lost anything but it took me 2 days to sort it out again.
4.0 has 2 editing windows, the standard one commonly used in 2.0, plus a quick version that's very handy when you just want to do stuff like crop, adjust color and brightness, resize, etc. Everything works from sliders and is very fast for doing a bunch of photos. To do more extensive stuff like using layers and being artistic, the standard editor is only 1 button away. I don't know how much of this applies to 3.0.
Both 3.0 and 4.0 are available on ebay but they're selling for about the same price, about $50.
Dick
