What are your essential programs?

Firefox - Still the best web browser, IMO. I love the interface, I love how the tabbed browsing is designed. I still have to keep IE around for all these morons who design websites that don't work in anything but IE, but I'd really rather just use Firefox for every single website. I employ the Fasterfox plugin and there is one that colors the tabs which I like to use as well.

Winamp - I've never found much reason to switch off Winamp to another player. I've had to use WMP as of late because my MP3 player requires a program that can sync with it (or I could do it manually but I'm lazy). I just saw that Winamp has a new sync feature. I haven't tried it out yet, but I'm excited at the thought of being able to get off another inferior MS product.

TextPad - I got into using this because it was what my computer science department recommended for Java programming. It is a full-featured text editor. They improve it vastly from version to version. It is quite easy to configure and completely free. Any computer I use this is probably the second program I install (after Firefox) because I use it for everything from writing notes and reminders to myself to writing posts.

Nero - Still the best burning program, I think.

Media Player Classic - I keep this around because I prefer it for videos to Winamp. Nothing too special about it.

IrfanView - I don't need a fancy picture browser. For anyone who's been around computers more than a decade, I used to love C-Show and C-Show 2000. I just like simplicity, and IrfanView provides that.

Paint Shop Pro - This is my preferred image viewer. I could go Photoshop but I don't need anything that full featured and I'm quite used to PSP.

ABC - This is my torrent client. This is kind of like Winamp for me where I've been told often that there are better programs, but I'm plenty happy with this one and I'm used to it.

mIRC - IRC is a great source for hard-to-find MP3s and, of course, chat. Nothing has ever surpassed mIRC as a client and I doubt anything ever will.

File Renamer Basic - I don't like tagging my MP3s, I really just care about artist, album title, track number, and song title, so I name my files as such. I'm very meticulous about my files all having the same naming conventions, this program makes it very easy to do that.

Microsoft Office - I've tried OpenOffice and I quite like it, but seeming that I have a legal copy of Office, this is just easier. Plus, when I was teaching, I did my lectures on PowerPoint and OpenOffice PPT files just didn't work well with the Office on the computers in the lecture halls so I was stuck with MS Office anyway.

Emulator Software - I prefer ePSXe, ZSNES, NEStopia and VisualBoyAdvance.

Programs Just to Make Sure the Computer is Functional - Spybot, Ad-Aware, Tweak UI, Tweak-XP Pro, O&O Defrag, PartitionMagic, Adobe Reader, WinRAR

Jam it back in, in the dark.