Ok, so I've been told I'm insane, but I enjoy doing some of my own prints for small orders.  I have an Epson 2200 and work from my laptop. I have the most basic color-correction of programs-- I use this thing called Colorvision, which comes with a basic Spider attachment thingy.  T
he program runs on automatic and does not give you any choices.  Lately, I've noticed that there is a deeper gap between what I see on the screen and what I see on paper, so... I am ready to invest on some REAL color correction sofware/hardware and have about $500 to spend.  Any advice?

The Spyder calibrates your monitor. What is missing is that you don't have an accurate printer profile. You can either buy a very expensive calibration system that includes a scanner for creating a printer profile, or you can use Pantone's DoctorPro software which lets you create a printer profile by matching your print to your on-screen display in Photoshop.

Karla,
You will also need a printer/paper/ink icc profile. Looks like you got the monitor calibrated. You can either do what John said above, or you can google some services online that offer to profile your printer/paper/ink and send you the resulting icc profile. Once you have this "printer profile," you can in photoshop complete the color managed workflow and get prints that matches closely to what you see on screen. If you use XP, you can download Microsoft's free color panellink here. With this color panel applet, you can view and compare the different icc profile and see just how much your printer can reproduce the sRGB or AdobeRGB color space. As well as how much color your monitor can see compared to the printer/paper/ink combo. With the 3D visualization, I can see what people means when someone say that a particular color is out of gamut of a particular color space.

-David

Thanks for the info! I use the Epson-provided ICC profiles for paper, but I do think I need to profile my printer.