I have just tried out theWindows Live Writer blogging tool and must say I am very impressed.
It will let you insert images, puts a drop shadow on (?) if you want and auto thumbnails.
It will handle pretty much all the formatting for you with no fuss, except it doesn’t seem to have style sheet awareness, which surprises me.
One feature I like, because I am a map nut, is the ability to stick maps and aerial views in all over the place. Like this:-
Seems to come with support for most flavours of blog, including WordPress, or you wouldn’t be seeing this.
I also found a great plug in for depressed WordPress users WordPress Suicide - kills your blog. 
Niiice
What’s the catch? They want the deeds to our houses?
– Cynical Gill
I thought they already had the deeds to everyone’s houses. They must have missed you out, emailing them now.
ha! they ain’t getting the deeds to ours – we are subversive Linux using types! however, it does mean we can’t use neat little tools like the blogging one, the Linux verison being very plain text only so far
Yeah, I’ve been using it for a while on and off, I am pretty impressed with it as well, I found it quite un-Microsofty in it’s open-ness. My only real gripe is that the plugin I use to add Flickr images in is rather slow and clunky to use – but that’s not really a criticism of the actual product.
I don’t think there is a catch Gill, I suspect that they have made it a pretty ‘open’ product to encourage bloggers on other platforms to use it, and then hopefully pull some of them over onto the Windows Live platform.
Didn’t quite understand your Styelsheet comment Tim.
It reads the stylesheet and displays it in the view pane, but doesn’t parse it and let you add styles to elements of the content.
It’s from Microsoft – and you’re surprised it isn’t stylesheet aware: am I missing something? They’ve yet to produce an application which is!
Like many other, recent offerings, this is an advertising vehicle – promoting other Microsoft services. They’re pushing the whole “Live” thing really hard at the moment. Desperate to out-Google Google, I reckon. My kids were playing a trivia quiz game through MSN Instant Messenger recently and I noticed that below the answer box is a “Windows Live Search” box. Blatant or what!?
Microsoft outgoogle Google? Didn’t know that MS was trying to become an ad network? That is what Google is. The search is, as far as I can see no better than Infoseek and Altavista were in their heyday, just bigger. I do find it odd that so many people seem to think that MS is mean and Google is kind of cuddly. They are both just big American corporations at the end of the day. And they both have agendas, as do people like Red Hat.
As far as CSS aware is concerned, why pick on Microsoft? All the alternatives are pretty rubbish, there isn’t a single tool I would depend on or which is significantly more useful than notepad for writing CSS, which of course is from Microsoft.