SoundForge?

Sound forge is probably your best choice because of all the formats it can do, just about open any audio format, this is specially good if you happen to come across some audio file in some strange format. but if your looking for something different go for izotope RX2 you may love it

or even RX3

Man... Haven't been to Sony's site in awhile. Audio Master Suite is looking pretty tasty. It does however have a few things I don't really need I see. I do like SF, CD Architect and Spectral Layers though but separately those are several beans more. Damn bundles.

I use SF now and again because it is good at some mastering tasks other than editing, where it sucks big time. It is good at wrangling plug-ins and is useful for burning CDs with codes etc., but I use Reaper for editing. It has a pencil tool that is occasionally useful, but pencils do not get rid of clicks and I deal with those sort of things in Reaper.

Why do you record farts...? I disagree with you though, Sound Forge is ace on microediting. You can get rid of clicks completely with the pencil if you know how. Unless the click is like second long then nothing will help. Or a fart... Advantage to Reaper not mentioned: the zooming in is a lot easier and faster which saves time. I don't know if it's on the scene anymore but Adobe Audition used to be quite popular wave editor, formerly known as Cool Edit.

It depends on what are your needs. I switched to Acon Acoustica a while ago, and i am happy with it. It does quite a lot of things, comes with nice plugins, handles several audio formats... I don't know what are SF's nowadays specs, so i can't really compare, but back in the days, when Sound Forge "Studio" (cut down version) wasn't enough for my needs and SF "full" was too expensive, was the good choice for me. There is a "simple" version at 39.90$, and a more advanced version with a nice restoration suite which costs 129$.

Update 

So far so good. Looks like I might be able to hack my Faderport into at least working with the Transport controls. Gotta mess around with it more. Man can you see the Reaper inspiration when using it, (Reaper's roots are loosely based on Vegas/SF) FX browser is a dead ringer. :) I can say that it is exactly what I needed. As a side note, I don't see myself using Spectral layers much at least for now. I'm sure I'll find creative uses for it though since I don't mind mangling sounds.

Wavosaur can do a lot of things the same way as SoundForge. 0$, 500 kB in size and can be launched from a thumb drive.

obviously, they are not quite identical in terms of functionality. Wavosaur can still be usefull at times. It rescued me while i was working for a radio station when their big integrated editing system broke down. I got the news files edited and ready for broadcast :-)