Software to create menu buttons

Can anyone suggest software to create menu butttons as I tried photoshop and the images look really bulky, the text is not really very good. I created these with the actual image size in mind so I did not distort the image. That way I just placed the image in the menu with the actual width andheight of the image. Looking to have two images per button, the active and non active.
see attached.

Fireworks (or fireworx...not sure how they spell it), or telerik is all I know of that is really, really GOOD. jQuery UI is FREE, tho!!!!!!

It is Fireworks. That's what I mainly use for image manipulation. It doesn't really make a difference which program you use, the quality of the output depends on how good the fonts are and what compression level you set (for JPEG images at least). with GIF and PNG you can make them higher or lower bit rates and that also affects file size and quality. Some images just have to be saved as a higher file size to get a quality that you are happy with.

If you want to have active/not active states set up on the buttons it's easy to do, and doesn't need any sort of JavsScript. Set up the CSS for that element to display a background of one image when it's active, and anther image when it's not active. If you want to get really tricky you can combine both images into a sprite and have CSS move the background position for the image depending on it's state. There's a lot of different ways of doing it.