I rarely use Adobe Bridge, but I find it pretty much worthless. Adobe Lightroom is free to download temporarly, and supposably it works alot like Aperture.
But I just view my images as thumbnails in windows and go from there.
I use Photoshop Elements 4.0, the photo browser feature. Right click an image in the organizer, and you can take it to standard edit or quick fix with the click of a mouse.