Picture display quality in Photoshop is bad

Question

I bought a new camera and bought Photoshop Elements 9 with it.  I took a bunch of pictures and was very disapointed with the camear's picture quality (or so I thought).  I then returned the camera.  As I was awaiting my new one, I decided to post to some forums about my poor image quality with the camera (A Lumix DMC-LX5) to see if maybe the camera was actually defective since it gets such good reviews.  As I was posting the pictures, I realized that they looked great when displayed in Firefox.  So I opened the images in every program I had installed that could display pictures and found the following:
Good
IE9
Firefox 4
Microsoft Office 2010
Paint
Quicktime Picture Viewer
Windows Media Center
Bad
Photoshop Elements 9
Windows Picture Viewer
The image below (best viewed in one of the "good" programs), shows a good image on the left opened in Quicktime Picture Viewer, and the bad image on the right open in Windows Picture Viewer (picture looks exactly the same in Photoshop Elements).  The funny thing is that the screen shot picks up the diffrence which can be seen in any of the viewers now while the original picture only displays poorly when viewed in the "bad" viewers.
Example below:  The asphalt and the grass in the picture on the right look very blotchy. The image on the left is what it looks like to the naked eye.  I have dozens of pictures where this same thing can be seen.
I wouldn't care if they all were bad but Elements but seing as how I'll be looking at them mostly in organizer, I realy need to get this resolved.  Any guidance would be appreciated.
One Note:  This is significantly more noticable with the DMC-LX5.  I don't notice this with my D90 images in RAW (the DMC-LX5 was high res jpeg).

Answer 1

The fact that pictures look right after disabling color management suggest that there may be a color profile problem.
Your 'good looking' softwares are not color managed (Firefox has an option to do so...)
Photoshop Elements is color managed, that is able to recognize a profile and use it.
When you open an image, in the lower bar showing the zoom %, you have another setting display drop down menu. Click on the little black triangle and choose 'Document profile'. Tell us what is shown : sRGB, AdobeRGB or whatever. Also, is there an option to select those profiles in your cameras ?
Normally you should never use the option 'No color management'. Especially if you shoot raw : in Elements, your raw files will be considered sRGB if the Editor preference is set to 'Always optimize color for computer screens', and it is considered AdobeRGB if it is set to 'Always optimize for printing'.