Among internet browsers,
K-Meleon. It's a slimmed cousin of FireFox and Mozilla that is highly optimized for Windows. Of all the browsers I used, it is the fastest loading, and along Opera, the fastest to surf. Nice for those with dialup and/or no patience.
Gratis.
GPL.
Virtual Optical Drives, you forgot to mention the free
Alcohol 52%. Gratis always beats payware. Its actually alcohol 120, but with the burning engine removed.
Gratis.
For Video and Audio Encoder/Converters:
LameFE. Can rip CD's and/or convert audio files, as well as recognize music using acoustic fingerprinting to properly rename files. No more "02-no artist - track18.mp3" files anymore !!
Gratis.
GPL.
MusicBrainz Picard allows acoustic fingerprinting too. Quite nicely, I would add. For the audio taggers category.
Gratis.
GPL.
Get your Yahoo/Hotmail emails on your desktop, WITHOUT having to go premium to get POP3 access.
FreePOPS can get your mails from h0tmail, AOL, Yahoo and others. Currently FreePOPS is for receiving email only btw. Those with Yahoo might want to use
Ypops instead, wich allows to send mails too.
All gratis.
For the chat category, I highly recommend removing mIRC, whose non-free and insecure nature can be considered a threat to anyone's system. I recommend
replacing it with
X-chat (from official site is payware, from elsewhere not)
Gratis.
GPL.
Among desktop search programs, there's of course
Google Desktop and
X1, X1 being very nice for email-crazed peeps, and Google, well...yeah...
Both gratis.
Image viewers;
-
FastStone Image Viewer. Reminds me of the good old acdsee before it got bloated like there's nothing else. Highly recommended.
Gratis.
OFFline Image editors:
Paint.NET (requires the .NET framework btw, surprinsingly, stunning)
Gratis.
Opensource.
ONline Image editors (requires internet of course):
CellSea. Who needs gimp, photoshop and others when they can do it online without installing anythin??
#$@%ING GRATIS !!!
Virtual Machine utilities. Cuz noone loves GRUB!!
VMware Player. To use a virtual machine.
VMware converter. To actually make a virtual machine from YOUR very actual windows system.
Both gratis of course.
CD/DVD software:
-
Deepburner (gratis, also comes in portable versions, handy for usb flash drives)
Gratis
Bookmark cleaners:
AM-Deadlink. Removes duplicate bookmarks, and checks existing ones for validity. No more dead links. An absolute must, sylenus !!
Gratis.
Website rippers;
Httrack. Handy to make a duplicate copy of a loved website. Dont try it with Emuforums though, unless you have at least 30 thousand gigabytes of spare disk space.
Gratis.
Exploring the world:
Google Earth. Uses higher quality commercial maps. Fast exploration, even faster when you go Pro.
Gratis.
WorldWind.
WP article. VEERY versatile. Has considerably more display-able stuff than the 'basic' Google Earth. 2x less accurate maps though.
Gratis.
Opensource.
To update your Windows system, better use
AutoPatcher. Saves time for new installations btw. Getting the full package is recommended.
Gratis.
============================
That's all I can remember for now. Btw, sylenus, you should append price to each selection in the 1st post. like 19.99 usd/gratis/free/gpl/opensource...
I hope you fellas like my list. There's more, but lets leave for another spammish post.