This is the the thread to talk up the open source or free software programs you like. I like open office. I actually don’t think it is as good as MS Office, but it is free, and is a hell of a lot better than MS Works. I like it. My second one is FoxIt reader. There is simply no reason to use Adobe reader when that’s out there for free.
GIMP (http://www.gimp.org/)
Audacity free audio recorder and editor.
malwarebytes anti malware
memtest
Combofix
Color Cop (so awesome when you’re trying to do a Web site and you don’t want to look up the code for “that green they used” 100 times.)
PureText (so awesome for when your client gives you all Word docs and you need to paste their text somewhere else)
XP Powertoys Calculator (best Windows calculator ever. Works on Windows 7, yes it does!)
Trillian (my multi-platform IM client of choice)
Good ol’ Eudora (It’s no Outlook. Or Thunderbird. Thank you for that!)
I like
XNVIEW for photos
EAC for ripping CDs
Handbrake for encoding videos
7-Zip for zipping / unzipping files
Auslogics for disk defrag
DAEMon Tools Lite - Virtual hard drives
EASEUS Partition Master - Partion and Change Drive sizes
MP3Tag - Tagging music files
DOSBox for playing old DOS games on Windows
Revo Uninstaller - Unistalling Programs from Windows
Notepad++ for advance uses (in place of basic Notepad)
PDF-XChange PDF Viewer - For PDF Viewing
Unlocker - Deleting locked files from Windows
I recommend using SnapFiles
Then browse their freeware section.
The free Nitro PDF Express is better than Foxit. It converts the file to a Word file and I can dump the stinking PDF entirely.
Soluto, the BEST startup controller/optimizer ever for PC’s. Lets you know exactly what programs are loading, how many seconds each takes, and which ones you can pause or delay until after booting. Still free in beta. I trimmed my startup time from 7:23 seconds to 5:35 seconds. I now know that Avast Antivirus is taking 28 seconds to load, Windows Defender is taking 27 seconds to load, and Soluto itself takes 9 seconds to load.
Celtx - screenplay writing software. May not be quite as good as the commercial apps like Final Draft, but I suspect it comes close. Way better than a word processor, at least.
I find Kompozer to be an excellent Web authoring tool. Very adroitly made.
Irfanview. Great image viewer.
Just an FYI, the best place I’ve found to find the best freeware is Gizmo’s Freeware.
No love for Firefox? 
Emacs - the text editor & kitchen sink - you’ll hate it for ages and then you might start to like it.
mplayer and VLC player are probably the best video players there are.
ETA: LibreOffice is probably going to be the most useful version of OpenOffice, now that most developers have ran away from Oracle.
Freemind - FreeMind
inkscape - http://inkscape.org/
For those doing genealogy, I like Personal Ancestral File. It’s just as good as the pay stuff for the most part. I’ve also learned that I can input information faster with it then any of the other programs I have used. The only thing lacking is the report features, which I think you can buy an addon for $9. There are some reports, but you can’t do major books and such.
Let’s face it, most people just use MS Project for making Gantt charts anyway, so www.ganttproject.biz is pretty sufficient.
AVG antivirus
Team Viewer - for remote support. I could not fix my grandparents’ computer without it.
CCleaner for general cleanup
DeepBurner
I also like firefox, irfanview and malwarebytes
Hmmm. I’m pretty close. With you on XNView and 7-Zip and Daemon tools when I needed it. I use CDex for ripping, and some mp3 tagger whose name I forget (the Godfather?). Just because they work well enough not to look for another.
For completeness: Open Office, AVG antivirus, Zone Alarm firewall, Firefox.
Does nobody consider Linux ‘free’?
Acrobat Reader is free too. What does Foxit do that Reader doesn’t?
Unless you need all the fancy stuff that Adobe Reader does (like flash video embedded in PDFs, and some kinds of fillable forms) pretty much all other readers are better because:
- They’re much quicker to start up.
- They tend to contain much less security issues. Adobe Reader is notoriously insecure.