What are your essential programs?

Mozilla Firefox - Obviously used for web browsing and having many pages open at the same times in multiple tabs. Adblock alone makes this just about the best web browser avalible.

Mozilla Thunderbird - Fast, customizable and easy to use E-Mail client. Granted it currently lacks some features of MS Outlook (i.e. a calendar) but for personal use it works just fine.

Foobar2000 0.8.3 - The only player for music on my system. Its customization options, ease of use and high system performance set this apart from all the rest in my opinion. It is really the only player that enables you to have full control over the playback chain. From output method, to the DSP array, you can achieve optimal playback quality with just about any sound card.

Media Player Classic - My first choice for media playback. Supports a plethora of internal filters, output (both audio and video) rendering methods, resize options (i.e. customized pan and scan of 16:9 clips) and direct support for inline subtitles. With the right codec packs, you can basically playback any a/v format currently in use today. And of course, it is very resource friendly.\

Miranda IM - My IM client of choice. Supports just about every IM protocol, which enables you to manage all of your accounts from one place and ensure you are always connected to your buds. This is also very customizable and external plug-ins can add a wide range of functionality to the program. Not good if you want to do fancy things like voice chat with the latest version of MSN messenger, but more than adequate if you just want to chat and maybe sent files from time to time.

uTorrent - After using BitComet for about two years, I wound up settling on this baby as my new client of choice (after BC became banned by just about every tracker I frequented.) The installation itself is small (runs from a singe executable) and uses system resources quite efficiently, even for torrents with a great deal of seeds/leechers.

CoolEditPro 2 - My audio editing/album mastering program of choice at the moment. It offers a wide range of options for the editing and manipulation of audio clips and recordings. Multi-track mode is great when you want to have full control of a stereo mixdown form a multi-channel source as you can easily move clips around (from channel to channel or backwards/forwards in the timeline.) It is a bit buggy though, and really memory hungry but only for really large files recorded at high sample rates.

Aston Shell - My GUI replacement of choice. Provides a nice alternative to Explorer and enable greater customization of the interface. Not exactly what I would call my favorite program, but I have grown to live with it.

Xnews - A great newsreader that is best use to download content from newsgroups. Several aspects of this program annoy me, including how it always pops up a dialogue offering to search Google if a post is not found on the server (which is annoying if you are navigating though sets of images); and the fact that several key functions (i.e. Next Message) cannot be assigned a shortcut key

Nero Burning ROM - My CD/DVD burning program of choice. Offers a great deal of options and is easy to use.

Microsoft Office - I primarily use this for editing/composing Word documents and spellchecking every forum post I make (yes I do it every time.) I used to use Excel quite frequently for school, but now I use it only if decide I need to compile data for miscellaneous things (like price lists, job hours reporting, etc.) I could just use OpenOffice, but I have found it easier to just use something that is recognizable by 95% of people I will sent things to.

CuteFTP - Have been using an ancient version of this FTP client for about 5-6 years now. I have tried running an updated version of this program before but was never able to get it working. This is one of those things that has always worked, so I never see reason to fix it.

SpyBot S&D - My only line of defense against unauthorized changes to my system (since I do not run A/V software.) Is really helpful in pinpointing know suspicious files and registry entries, and features some really powerful system tools (for editing the HOSTS file, viewing registers network protocols, securely shredding files, etc.) The TeaTimer app is one of the most important applications I currently use. I find its ability to instantly inform me of registry changes (be they good or bad) to help in my defense against the worst the web has to offer.

ZSNES - My SNES emulator of choice. There is nothing sexier than running a gorgeous game like Chrono Trigger at 1280x1024 with an AA filter in place running at 60FPS (synced with your monitor resolution). Granted the emulation still isn't perfect for all games, but it is the closest one can get to perfect emulation of this system.

Jam it back in, in the dark.