Looking for a decent illustration program that is windows 7 compatible and won't break the bank - any ideas?

As the first person said, check out Gimp at a href="http://www.gimp.org." rel="nofollow"http://www.gimp.org./a It's the closest thing to full Photoshop, and it's free. There are versions for Windows, Mac, and Linux (which is what it was originally designed for). If you need a Vector drawing program (like Adobe Illustrator) take a look at Inkscape a href="http://www.inkscape.org." rel="nofollow"http://www.inkscape.org./a It's also free.