Oie... Just to let you know, I do see some other threads about this, but I am looking for what ya'll like the best, and why. I don't want to spend my money on this stuff, it is going to no look good!
There's some examples there of what you can do with CC2.
It is pricey and has a steep learning curve if you have never used a CAD program before. But for help in using the program, the CC2 list at yahoo group is a great place to go for help, advice and tips.
For serious map making, CC2 and Paintshop Pro are probably your best bets (or so I've heard).
I, however, am very cheap and don't want to spend $50+ on map making software (hey...I used to make maps with a peice of hex paper and a box of crayolas...why should I spend much more now?)
So I just started using Dungeoncrafter (www.dungeoncrafter.com). It's free (did I mention that I'm cheap?). It has tilesets available for all manner of interiors and even some village and town tilesets. It is very easy to use and you can easily save it as a jpg or bmp format.
I've also been known to use MS Paint to draw some pretty nice maps in relatively short order. I open two bit maps. One I use as a tile work space to create small tiles of opjects that I'd like to replicate over and over and then I simply cut and paste into the main map. It works pretty well for free....Certainly you can't make maps as cool as what you can do with CC2 with these methods, but considering most of my maps are used in one or two sessions (and many are never seen by the players), who cares?