ACDSee used to be good, way back when, but it seems now to be overloaded with features I don't care about.

Tell me about it, which is why I am still using ACDSee Classic, which doesn't have any of the useless new features and is about the fastest image viewer I know. It tends to be one of the first apps I install on any machine. It is particularly fast at switching backwards and forwards between two images in a row, which makes comparing two photos so you can keep the best painless. If only other photo views did what it does and cached the decoded copies of the previous jpeg in memory.

Unfortunately it is lacking at least one feature that I would like, it doesn't display EXIF data.