I've been making Panos and HDR and HDR Panos on free software for a while, so i'll share my thoughts:
I use Linux (hence I couldn't use PS even if I wanted to), so I use Hugin for Panos and HDR Panos, and Luminance HDR i use for HDRs.
Both are free, both have windows versions (afaik).
Both are very powerful programs, unfortunately too powerful for their own good (at least, too powerful for their user manuals).
Hugin for panoramae works very well in automatic mode, you get to check that it's all nice and good and fix things, if it fails you can do it manually anyway (normally it fails if your images don't overlap enough, or they're really dark or have very repetitive patterns, i tried yesterday to stitch 6 shots of the Milky Way taken with my samyang 35/1.4, ended up doing the whole thing manually).
For HDR Panoramae, I tried just creating the file in Hugin (to tonemap in Luminance), but it uses shadow information from even the darkest shot (instead of taking shadows from the brightest only), so he image is incredibly noisy. Now I use Hugin to create panoramae layers of similar exposure, then merge to HDR in Luminance.

As for Luminance HDR, again it's very powerful. For bracketed shots (even without a tripod), it can align them nicely, for pre-panoramaed layers from Hugin and Tripod shots it's even better, but you can't stitch and HDR in one, you have to pre-stitch in Hugin. You can de-ghost (like I always have ducks swimming on lakes i'm trying to photograph), but results vary.
Creating the .exr file there's too many options to choose from and no explanation of what they do (google it and you'll find numerous people complaining about this too). Through trial-and-error i've decided preset4 works nicely for most shots, if you've got the time it's worth experimenting.
Then when tone-mapping, again, there's too many options, you just have to try each out and see what it looks like. Man'06 makes nice 'HDR-look' photos, but on the linux version you get a black bottom-right corner (my mate uses it on windows and makes nice ones), just leave 'detail' at 1 or expect a lot of noise. The last option (forgot what it's called) makes for nice ones with 'local tone-mapping' checked. Fattal (i think) makes interesting ones but can bring in the false-colour look too easily (makes nice B+Ws from what I remember though)

Anyway, that's what I remember off the top of my head, haven't used them for a month or two, been too busy. Considering that they're free, if you've got the time to experiment then they're well worth the look, I can give more pointers later too if you're interested.