You can never go wrong with Adobe Audition. I don't know how many versions are out right now, but IMO 3.0 is still the best. I dabble in music here and there, record some tracks and mix/master them myself and 3.0 has never failed me, plus it has a built in VST plugin manager, so you can download a VST pack of cool effects, load them into Adobe and ta-daaa, you basically have a ton of studio equipment equivalents in one handy program.
It took me a couple of months to really learn the program and everything you can do with it, but as far as simple editing goes, it shouldn't take you more than a couple of days to figure your way around, and if you already have some experience with editing programs, one day should be enough. If you want, I can send you some songs that are recorded and mixed in Adobe, so you can get an idea of the programs capabilities. Some of the people I worked with are professionals and they didn't have any objections to the quality of the tracks I sent them, or did with them(I should point out that I am, at best, an average "producer", but Adobe has so many different options and tricks - you can get studio quality sound on any crappy Pentium 4 machine).