Elements is a standalone and isn't as intrusive. Everything happens locally.
IrfanView is magnificent for what it is. It's not a full-featured photo editor, in my opinion. Not even that great for tweaking, but those plugins look like they've got some merit. I use IrfanView for picking the keepers quickly (tho FastStone (also free) is pretty neat - especially for checking focus on my bees/birds) and might become a go-to for that.
I've tried both gimp and Paint.net (among lots of others) and both were overly complicated for my tastes. If I'm going to fiddle with a picture (after I've determined it's one I want to fiddle with), I'd prefer to put 2-3 mins into it instead of 2-3 hours. Elements lets me do that, usually. And I really like the way it deals with .RAW files (at least out of Pentax...dunno about anything else).
For cropping, I love IrfanView, but it re-saves the .jpg and that's a lossy save. So if you're working from a .jpg and save it as a straight .jpg, you're losing a bunch of stuff and introducing a bunch of other stuff. Which, in just about every respect, is kind of a bad thing to do. There's an option to create a "lossless crop" which I used in making a calendar once. But it's clunkier than just saving it out.
IrfanView is also pretty good at batch processing. Not necessarily for finishing the photos, but for cutting crops or overlaying text (even metadata) or even for resizing. (Tho we think that Elements does a better job resizing for the site (1000x pixels wide max) than either IrfanView or the site's native resizer.
One thing that's really easy to do (at least for me) with any editor is to overdo it. Lots of times a minor tweak will really make something pop. And more edits will just make the thing look plastic or pretend.
All that said, I still haven't figured out a consistent workflow for the volume of stuff I shoot...nor a consistent processing process. But I'm pretty pleased, mostly, with Elements. The documentation is abysmal, though.
