Is there a browser plugin or a freeware piece of stand alone software
(for Windows) that can copy text out of an image.  For example, if a
jpeg or gif image has no real graphics in it, but instead only text
that was typed into an image and saved out as a gif/jpeg, is there
software out there that can copy the text out of the image into the
clipboard for pasting as text, not for pasting the whole image, and if
so, can you point me to where i can get this plugin or freeware?  I am
not looking for a long process here in which i would have to copy and
paste the image, separate it into layers, then copy the text layer -
short and sweet.
thanks

Use Microaoft Paint it will do it. To go to paint click on Start
Menu-All Programs-Accesories-Paint then open ur picture in it and it
will solve it.

no, paint does not solve the problem.  I need to select the text, copy
it, and then paste it as text-only into a text editor

OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software does what you are looking
for, although I don't know of a broswer plugin for this.

For a standalone application, you can try SimpleOCR:
http://www.simpleocr.com/

If your image is a gif or a jpeg, it's not so easy to "get text out
from" it, since there is essentially no text in it anymore. All the
text has been turned into patterns of pixels, and the file itself does
not reveal the source of those pixels; text in a gif or jpeg is just
shapes, like any other shapes. Once your file is saved, an image of
the letter 'I' and an image of a skyscraper are pretty much the same
thing.

What you probably need is optical character recognition (OCR), which
can turn bitmapped "text" into real text by examining the shapes and
contours within the image and guessing what letters those shapes and
contours may represent. This works best with a very sharp, clear image
in which the font used was of the plain, non-decorative sort.

Here's an item of OCR software at a reasonable price:

http://www.edti.com/winocr30.htm

thanks for all the suggestions.  i found something on my own, called
kleptomania - it works, but not that great - oftentimes it misses
charactters, but it is exactly what i'm looking for, found it
myself...but i could use something just like it that works better. 
anyone any ideas?