PhotoShop Elements 7 Question

I'm shooting aRGB in an sRGB world, and that has brought to mind all kinds of question.
One of them is about PSE 7, which I just purchased. A couple of days ago, I did a story for which I didn't have digital illustrations, so I got out some of my old slides and scanned them. When I took these scans into PS, it asked me to chose and I clicked on aRGB.
But it occurred to me PS never asks me when I bring my digital aRGB images in for processing. I presume it is processing them in aRGB, but I haven't figured out how to tell.
And I sort of suspect that when I save the processed images in JPEG, it might be converting them to sRGB. Again, I don't find any color choices in the save commands.

Never mind. I found the color setting and clicked to "always optimize for printing." Since I had to change that from "always optimize for computer screens," I presume I've been converting my aRGB images to sRGB since starting to shoot in that color a couple of weeks ago.
I'm still wondering, however, why it asks for the scans (Epson perfection 4490) and not for the digital camera images? PSE7 supports this scanner, and I can import them directly from it, if I want.
This stuff sure gets complicated between software packages and operating systems.