B)Do you make banners with them? If so is it easy to learn the software/ via practice? (I learnt and mastered Dreamweaver), so woundering if the banner software was easy to learn..?
Fireworks is a graphics program aimed particularly at web graphics. So I guess that could be good for banners Flash is the animation software, so ideal for creating animated banners Plenty of tuts around for both so you should be fine - though they are a different beast to DW.
Fireworks is pretty easy to learn. You can make animated gifs with Fireworks. Flash will make animated banners, but they are swf files and Flash (in my opinion) is harder to learn. Freehand is Macromedia's vector program that is similar to illustrator (at least I think so). I am not sure if you can make animated images with freehand. Out of all of these, I would reccommend Fireworks. There are tons of tutorials online for Fireworks too.
Although I normally use Photoshop when I create banners, Fireworks was designed for making Webcontent. (Imageready and Photoshop do come together). A free solution is TheGimp.
Flash can export animated .gifs, it doesn't have to be a .swf file.
In my personal opinion i would suggest flash, fireworks to me seems very limited and really cant make as good graphics as flash. I use photoshop for my graphics work andfor flash animation you could export your images from photoshop to there and animate.
you can almost do everything with photoshop except from flash banners that you must use Flash or SwishMax which has many nice features and ready scripts for beginners
Flash is the animation software, so ideal for creating animated banners 
