Reg,
The PanoGuide website <
http://www.panoguide.com/software/> has links to many third part stitching software applications. If you have much image stitching to do, you might want to try one of those programs. The software reviews at PanoGuide are frequently not of the latest version, but can be a good guide.
Making good image stitches is not as simple as just matching up the photos in the overlap zones. Perspective corrections, color and brightness mismatches, lens distortions, and other things can make manual stitching very tedious. You might want to try one of the free demos of The Panorama Factory <
http://www.panoramafactory.com/> or PanaVue’s Image Assembler <
http://www.panavue.com/index.htm>. If you have a lot of image stitching to do and price is no object, the ultimate image stitcher software is REALVIZ Stitcher <
http://www.realviz.com/products/st/index.php>
— Burton — (not associated with any vendor mentioned)