If it makes things worse, it is a sign of incompetency from the developer. Beyond typical quick and dirty projects, an IDE is incredibly useful in terms of convenience and productivity, not to mention assisting you with "proper" development.
I use a simple but powerful HTML editor called Araneae for all my coding needs. For testing purposes I run Apache Friends's XAMPP webserver directly from my laptop
I use ZDE (zend) myself, and also dreamweaver (mainly for doing html templates / css). If your coming from a ms development environment, you might find that zend is something that you should be able to use straight off the bat, inbuilt source management, debugging etc etc. i think zde is the most professional one out there at the moment if you don't mind paying for your IDE
The main thing was trying to start debugging. It has 3 options start debugging, run it, and run it on web server server I think. I had to configure a profile for each of those options. If I wanted to debug a different file it asked me to create a profile for that file also. On top of that there were also a profile to run as script or web server. It's been a while since I used it so I am just going off memory. Btw, I am referring to Zend Studio for Eclipse.
PHPDesigner or Zend Studio since I have licenses for both it's just a matter of picking which editor works best for what project. They both have their quirks unfortunately or I'd stick to just one.
"OpenKomodo" From free ones, that i tested is best. Why best? Because it got Variable suggestion so when i put somwhere $MyVariable i can type $My and CTRL+space and it will be suggested so this way i can write code much faster. I miss from Zend Studio the option to create new file after i type it inside the code and click CTRL+Left M Button (or something similiar). Komodo uses more resources then i have on my 7 years old PC, so on it i use PSPad.
I get the impression you're looking for a PC solution, but if you're not (or for any mac users out there) look into TextMate from MacroMates. It's a killer, streamlined text editor that can support any language/markup using regular expressions and css selectors for styling. I can't post links yet but MacroMates website is http://www.macromates.com/