I'm pretty excited by this one, just came across it yesterday. "EVEREST Free Edition 2.20" basically tells me all my hardware components of my computer. Was looking to upgrade my RAM on my laptop, this baby tells me exactly what ram module i currently have and how many spare slots i have. Try it you'll be impressed about the info it gives you.
my favorite was the 6 months trial of the norton 2005, the google pack edition, but now i don't find that option there! adaware se personal, adobe reader, spybot, actually there are a lot of these
The one I use most often is MySQL. Boring perhaps, but it powers all of my commercial websites. After that - a humble boring text editor called npad2.exe ... bit like Notepad but with line numbers and some colours. Ooooo - and Outlook Express, I guess. (is that free ? Hmm... I guess it's part of the OS, so you have to pay for it). Oh, and Firefox I guess, though I can live without it. Meow Purr.
A little late, but 2 not mentioned... IrfanView (use it daily) HTMLKit (text-based HTML editor) Will be looking into Filezilla as I was looking for a new FTP client, which is what brought me to this thread.