What are your essential programs?

Foxit Reader- It's like Acrobat Reader minus the bloat and annoying startup times.
Bulletproof FTP Server and DynDNS updater- Can't nobody say that I never did nothing for the peoples. ^^
FileZilla Client- The inverse of the above. I use it to download music from other people.
Winamp- My favorite music player, and it can play a bunch of formats that iTunes doesn't support.
iTunes- I use it to sync my iPod, and occasionally as a music player. Winamp is smaller and nicer for playing, though.
uTorrent- the smallest, fastest BitTorrent client that I've found. It's replaced BitComet for me, since that seems to be banned at an awful lot of trackers.
SonicStage- It's crap, but it's what my burner came with. I should pirate Nero, or something. ;_;
The GIMP- Useful for all sorts of basic image editing tasks. It's a far sight cheaper than Photoshop.
WinRAR- The perfect archive program, bar none. It's shareware, but it's worth the money/the nag messages/finding a torrent of it.
WindowBlinds (or uxtheme, if I'm lazy)- The default Windows XP theme looks like it was designed by Playmobil, and this makes it look nicer.
OpenOffice or Microsoft Office- My laptop has MS Office, my desktop gets OpenOffice. For my rather basic purposes, they're about the same, and they beat Notepad for serious work. ^^
ZSNES, ePSXe, WinUAE, MAME32, DOSBox and RockNES- The best emulators (well, DOSBox isn't exactly an emulator, but that's not the point) for their respective systems. Yay for old games!

Jam it back in, in the dark.