A Step Above Paint for Windows?

I have had Gimp running on several Windows boxes and I think one of them was XP. I had no real trouble but it was necessary to read about the installation. As I recall there was something like "GTK Toolkit" (I might not have the name correct) that had to be installed before Gimp. Whatever download page I was using had instructions and downloads for both.

I have been happy with Gimp on both Windows and Linux.

Be careful with free downloads that are not GPL. A lot of free stuff has viruses, spyware, etc. GPL programs from sites like Sourceforge should always be clean.

I used paint.net several years ago. It is a nice free step up from MS Paint. You can download it from http://www.getpaint.net/

Good luck,
Adam

Not sure what you are wanting to do, but this may be of use to you.

Plenty here; http://cr4.globalspec.com/thread/12126

Gimp is a bitmap/raster graphics program, meant mainly for artistic expression and photo editing. If you try to enlarge or reduce things, you lose information. For doing simple sketches it sucks because it was not designed with sketching in mind.

Its vector graphic free open license counterpart is Inkscape. This is akin to CorelDraw. Draw ovals, rectangles, lines, and curves. All of these you can easily edit after drawing them. Fill objects with different colors easily, and on.

Get it here.