The one that comes with it is pretty powerful. It has a hashing function that provides for an extremely low chance of collisions. It has a specalized template for strings to help prevent collisions. When you define the class you can pass in your own hashing function in the template parameters if you have a more specialized needs, etc… It is immensly powerful.
The best documentation on the current stl and the stl_ext libraries is at http://www.sgi.com/tech/stl/table_of_contents.html and if you search for ‘hash’, you will find things from hash_set’s, hash_map’s, multi versions of each, and a generic ‘hash’ function which is used by the afore mentioned ones.
Also, if anyone reads this thread, you should take a look at the rope class, if you want a very fast string function to handle strings that can be arbitratilly large and still remain fast. It is unsuitable for anything short however. 
EDIT: Here is a code snippet of how to use the hash_map that comes with C++, with the key being a string, and the value being an int.
[code]eqstr
{
bool operator()(const char* s1, const char* s2) const
{
return strcmp(s1, s2) == 0;
}
};
int main()
{
hash_map<const char*, int, hash<const char*>, eqstr> months;
months[“january”] = 31;
months[“february”] = 28;
months[“march”] = 31;
months[“april”] = 30;
months[“may”] = 31;
months[“june”] = 30;
months[“july”] = 31;
months[“august”] = 31;
months[“september”] = 30;
months[“october”] = 31;
months[“november”] = 30;
months[“december”] = 31;
cout << "september -> " << months[“september”] << endl;
cout << "april -> " << months[“april”] << endl;
cout << "june -> " << months[“june”] << endl;
cout << "november -> " << months[“november”] << endl;
}[/code]