Just showing up my novicenish here, but I just use DPP at the moment. I always shoot in RAW, then tweak in DPP and convert to JPEG. That seems to give me just about everything I want to do; I can straighten, crop, change saturation, colour temperature and do a bit of noise reduction, as well a use curves. I have, I feel, a fairly good organisational struture to my photos in the standard windows programme.
I have heard people say Lightroom is good. What extra would I be likely to get from it that would give it the "I don't know how I lived without that" factor?
This may seem like I'm jumping on the back of this thread, but I'm sure the answer would benefit the OP as well.
Part of the reason for asking this now is because the OH currently has student status after studying for an MA, although that will be going soon!