I am currently searching for the best graphics viewer for my purposes.
I used to use acdsee 2.43 (or something like that) but I need animated gif support.
I currently use irfanview but it doesn't resize overly large pics very well ( I don't want scrollbars if it's taller than the screen, I want the pic resized).

I don't want thumbnails either and I REALLY don't want some database chugging away in the background. You must be able to switch this off.

I've had a serious look at acdsee 7 but I can't figure out how to stop the database part. If anyone knows then my search will probably stop there. Though acdsee 7 seems a bit expensive.

My list of requirements is much the same as mouser's apart from that, oh and I must be able to cut a selection and 'paste as new image' which I can then save in common formats.

I have looked at most of the viewers on zaine's site and not come up with 'the one' yet. Compupic (sp?) kept on crashing for me.

I agree with ^, no skins, Ever! The resource usage overhead is completely unnecessary for a utility application. A sking for a program that pops up for a second or two??  hrrrmmph!

I bought approcket (unfortunately), before I found F&R to be much better. I worry about bloat as F&R gets developed more though. Approcket uses ~20mb on my PC! There's another program; 1st turborun http://www.turborun.com which is similar but less well implemented (I might add) that runs under ~2mb.
For me anything that sits in the tray has to be extremely light on resources.

I don't know diddly about the programs themselves but as a user of what they produce (and that's just as important) robodemo has stood out enough among the ones I've watched for me to notice. (Used to love robohelp too when I had to write the stuff).