What is your experience with various password protecting programs?

I have tried several programs that are designed to password protect folders that contain information I would rather not share with others.

While they seem perfectly able to password protect a folder, this folder seems far from secure. In each case, the folder itself is not accessible without entering the password, but the files are visible in the finder under "recent documents".

I was hoping for a program that could securely protect these documents from casual viewing (including the "search for" section of the finder bar) while being relatively user friendly. I don't care about encryption. I don't need to protect anything from a dedicated attack. I also prefer that it doesn't have a long loading time to open files or serious risk of corruption.

Maybe I am asking too much. If the program is what I'm looking for, I would even consider paying for it.

I tried creating a disk image through hard drive utility, but it took a while (several minutes) to and this doesn't really fit my use.

 

Well, what prompted me to refresh my password protect program is tax information (You know, tax day was yesterday). But in reality I have a variety of items. I have chat transcripts and other private correspondence I don't want generally available (and no, it's not like I'm cheating or anything), private financial data, some images and a few assorted random items.