What are your essential programs?

Mozilla Firefox - Web, yo.
foobar2000 - Music, yo.
Azureus - For all my BitTorrent-ing needs.
blackbox - In Windows, I use this as my shell instead of explorer.
cygwin - Does not need much explanation.
xplorer2 - ...and I use this as my file manager. Love.
GAIM - Chatting.
zsh - My favorite command line shell.
svn - Subversion, for version control.
apache2 - For my own web server on my Linux box. It's my SVN server too, and I set it up to access my stuff from anywhere with the Internet.
FileZilla - For my FTP needs.
XWin - My X Server for Windows platforms.
EditPlus 2 - My Windows notepad replacement.
mIRC - My IRC client to spam #gfmp3 on irc.xelium.net.
Cisco Systems VPN Client - I use this this from home to access exclusive university stuff, and even on campus sometimes just for a better connection.
VLC Media Player - My video player of choice, along with the popular codec packs (CCC, those "alternvative"...).
xemacs - The universal text editor of choice.
GoogleTalk - I never use it, but it's always running to let me know of incoming gmail.
pureFTPd - MY FTP server of choice.
[Adobe] Macromedia Studio - For my web development needs.
Microsoft Visual Studio 2003 - I use this among other powerful choices for programming IDEs.
eclipse - I use this often enough too.
Nero Burning ROM - 1 of 2 CD burning programs I use.
Alcohol 120% - This is the other.
Adobe Acrobat/Reader - P-D-F.
Irfanview - A nice utility for viewing images and some basic processing.
PuTTy/Pageant, ssh, sshd - Popular choices for SSH-ing.
Microsoft Outlook, Mozilla Thunderbird, pine - e-mail.
NOD32 - My AV of choice.
Spybot S&D, SpywareBlaster, SpywareGuard, Microsoft Antispyware, etc. - Requirements for running Windows.
Daemon Tools - For ISO loading.

That's about it for programs/suites that are always running or I would use at least once about every three days.

Jam it back in, in the dark.