We've been loving version 2 of Picasa, Google's free digital photo manager software (Windows only).
Like Apple's iPhoto, Picasa lets you rate your images with stars and assign keywords - imagine "show me all the highest-rated photos of Fido as a puppy." It also can correct red-eye, resize and apply effects, publish albums to the web, backup your photos and even password albums for those particularly naughty snaps you don't want Mom to accidentally stumble upon.
Once we installed Picasa and it indexed our hefty photo library (which didn't degrade performance at all), we just uninstalled the crappy software that came with our camera, and import photos directly into Picasa. Give it a try if you want to rediscover the photographic masterpieces buried on your hard drive.