particle illusion and particular are nice because the both come with a bunch of presets and you can find more presets for them on the web. you might also want to post what you are looking for the particle illusion and trapcode forums at the cow, you might get exactly what you want.
that being said, you should be able to do this with particle effects that came with ae, like cc particle world, it just may be more work. particle world is a pretty decent particle generator… try a point source for the generator, directional (rather than explosive), some sort of small sphere like particle (rather than line), and add some sort of twirly behavior to the particles, and no gravity and see what you can start to get from there.
Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW