I was musing contentedly the other day over my happy little PC setup and realised there are a number of free progs I just couldn't be without and I'm sure everyone has some of these they'd love to share.
AVG and Avast for free anti-virus of course, and Sygate for a good firewall, but those other, quirky little progs.
Such as this one - Alfaclock Free
I've used this very nice little clock programme for some years - it never causes any trouble, is lovely to use, simple and very functional. I love the way I can display the date, day and time on my system tray in any form I like - I always need to know the day at a glance, but even I seldom forget the month, so I have it display like this:
9 Mon 14:17 but you can make it display any way you like (it will even speak the time if you want, though you won't 
: you can make it recheck the time and adjust itself instantly, there is a useful little calendar reachable with one click on the system-tray date, which I use all the time.
Any more? (we'll keep this topic pinned.)
Pani gave me a really neat little freeware program the other day.
Deskpins - Pin any window on your desktop to make it topmost
He thought it would be useful for keeping a TVCatchup window open and on top to keep an eye on while doing other things - which it is - but it's also very useful so you can pin one Texturiser/Word box open while typing in another, which I often need to do while working on redrafts of my book. I'm sure there are other situations where it would be useful also,
It's free and absolutely easy to install and use.
You can get Deskpins here
Check Filebox Extender
http://www.hyperionics.com/files/index.asp
It includes the pin feature -- don't know how I managed without it.
If you try it, be alert to the "window roll-up" button (a little triangle) -- it took me by surprise early on when I cicked it inadvertently.
I love - and constantly use - Agent Ransack:
http://www.mythicsoft.com/agentransack/
because it happens so often that I want to find a file quickly and either can't remember exactly where I put it or don't want to hunt around manually or can't remember the exact filename ...
with the lovely lifesaving Agent Ransack, all I have to remember is some salient feature about the file I'm looking for (such as "modified since [date]" or any part of the name or even just a distinctive word in the text (if it's a file containing text) or the file extension .... )
Yay!!! 
Thanks for joining in girls!
Comodo is my firewall of choice. Despite having a name sounding like a cross between a portable toilet and a big lizard it is a very good piece of free software.
For transfer from DVD9 to DVD5, DVD Shrink allows you to selectively compress various tracks and remove unwanted foreign languages before writing to a 4.7 gig DVDR. Compression down to about 65% is possible before it becomes noticeable, but removal of unwanted parts of a DVD is often sufficient to allow the main content to remain untouched.
RamPage sits in the corner of the taskbar monitoring memory usage and displaying how much is free. Memory can be freed up from non-essential tasks by clicking on the icon which will force Windows to swap unused memory out to disk.
I'll second that about DVD Shrink. A while back I got a modified version so that it uses ImgBurn to do the actual burning to DVD (originally it used DVD decryptor which was good, but a bit out of date now) but DVD Shrink itself is irreplaceable.
These are all free big programs as opposed to little tools.
Free painting program Paint.NET which even (almost) works in Linux 
PDN is pretty fine, however in common with many such programs it takes a bit of getting used to.
Free Vector drawing Inkscape this is a great package and can produce SVG output if you need it.
Free Photoshop equivalent is of course The Gimp though the user interface is... err... odd you can get add ons which make it almost photoshop
Free Office Applications OpenOffice should need no introduction.
Desktop Publishing... Scribus - this is nOT a word processor like MS word or open office writer. It is a DTP package, and consequently needs a beefy PC to run it.
No need for Pirated/Dodgy/illegal software at all then
Ron
... which reminds me of another photo processor program called Raw Therapee. It has raw converters for most digital SLRs, and although a bit slow on my PC, seems to produce nice images.
Another is Opanda IExif. This links into Windows Explorer to enable EXIF info to be displayed on web images that have them preserved. The info gives things like date of orginal photo, camera and lens info, and camera settings. Very useful if you like a photo and wonder what settings the photographer used to take it.