What is available now? There are a large number of slide show programs. Popular Photography recently did a comparative review of 18 of them.
Many of them focus on visual appeal, e.g., fancy transitions between slides.
Often the emphasis is on making it easy for the recipient of a slide show (e.g., on a CD-ROM) to view it, but this tends to mean that it is not easy for the recipient to revise or add to it.
Few of them have the flexibility we want in handling text. (Only 5 of the 18 in the review above can handle text at all.)
Freeware Ulead Photo Explorer 6.0 has some good tools for working with digital photos (e.g., adjusting brightness) in addition to a slide show capability. Thumber (shareware) does a good job of resizing photos and making thumbnails.