What's the difference between Photoshop, Illustrator, and Fireworks?

I know Photoshop is supposed to be primarily for editing photos but you can definitely create new graphics on it if you wish.

What I'm hoping to do is create clean, professional-looking graphics and animations and I don't know which program is best for what. Flash is obviously best for most animation and the new CS3 Photoshop has a nice animations feature but what about simply creating new images? What should I use for what?

What's the difference between Photoshop, Illustrator, and Fireworks?antivirus protection

photoshop edits regular still images, illustrator and fireworks do things like make vector images(scalable with no quality loss) and gif images...