FreeWare

• [Nethack]
  
• [Angband]
  
• [Xquest]
  
• [Comprehensive list]. Quality varies, but their ratings are fair so just sort by ratings and stick to the 5- and 4-star titles and you'll be OK :) Not all the games listed are free, but most are free and GPL, and a surprising number of the best ones have Windows ports.
  

• PuTTY
  

• [AVG Free] - Seems OK so far, though I had some trouble with the e-mail scanner early on.
  

• [Kerio] nee 'Tiny Personal' - silently drops incomings that you don't like, logs whatever you want and can be configured up-front or on demand.  Blocks outgoing by default.  (Vitenka recommends)
  

Well, most are free anyway, but these probably deserve mention:

• [FireFox] - Generally excellent.  The first browser (to Kazuhiko's mind) to match IE in terms of html rendering
  
• [Netscape] - V8beta (since when does the default download link on an established piece of software take you to a beta version??) lets you alternate between using the FireFox renderer and the IE renderer at the click of a button.  Apparently, it's rather heavy on the Netscape advertising however.
  

• [ThunderBird] - Kazuhiko has a couple of minor quibbles (those coloured bars for quotes really get on my nerves), but generally good
  

• [OpenOffice.org] - A little clunky compared to Microsoft's offering, but still good and easy enough to work with
  

• [The Gimp] - Mixed feelings here.  It seems to work but seems to have quite a few rough edges.  ScriptFoo? in particular seems like a wonderful idea until you realise you have to be an artist to understand the effect you want and a programmer to understand the script to do it.  Most of my grievences probably come from comparing it with AdobePhotoshop? however, which is more than a little unfair.
  

• [Irfanview] - So good, I was sure it was ShareWare, but it turns out to be FreeWare!  Sometimes a trifle over-ambitious (no, I don't really need to see a graphical rendition of txt files) but otherwise no complaints whatsoever.
  

• [BurnAtOnce] - Used it a few times now and it certainly passes the basic tests (data cd, data cd from iso/bin, audio cd from mp3) --K
  
• [Burn4Free] - Crappy - but very simple to use.  Lacking the powerful features I'd like ('close this disk someone else burnt') but has a lot of features normal people want.
  

• [VirtualDub] - the swiss army knife. You can use this to chop up your source into clips, do simple processing and change the codec a video is encoded with. With a bit of thought, you can also do more esoteric things like combining an image sequence into a video and attaching a soundtrack to it, or splicing together several clips into a single video.
  

• [AviTricks] - video editing; compositing and effects. Freeware. Allegedly. Anyone care to try it out and post about the experience? MoonShadow doesn't have a copy of Windows to hand.
  

• [Wax] - another free video editor. Anyone tried it?
  

• [Zweistein] - another one.
  

• [Transcode] - this can be used for much what you'd use VirtualDub? for. There's GUIs around - Google is your friend - but it's most powerful when combined with [ImageMagick] or the netpbm utilities using a bit of Perl or shell script.
  

• [Kino] - a tool for DV capture and editing (if your source isn't DV it'd have to be converted). Clunky FisherPriceInterface? but seems to do the job.
  

• [LiVES] - a general-purpose allegedly friendly video editor which MoonShadow still hasn't tried out.
  

• [Cinelerra] - this is the one MoonShadow and SunKitten use.
  

This sounds great but I'm a little confused by the live CDs.  Can they access the hard drive?  Since I'm running NTFS, I'm guessing not, but then how can a video editor work?  Entirely in memory with no way to save your work? --K

Most Live CDs can at least read NTFS.  All of them can access your hard drive (though some need a bit of techie knowledge to get them to do it) so have a FAT partition or a CD burner, I guess, to save.  I think the main idea of a live CD here is to let you test the software on a dry-run, not keep using it that way.  --Vitenka

In general you'd need to make a FAT32 partition on your hard drive, or maybe use a USB key or something, in order to transfer data between the two operating systems. There's [Captive NTFS], but I don't think it's made its way onto any live CDs yet. - MoonShadow

• [#develop] - Not tested it, but it seems to be an open source complete replacement for Microsoft's Visual Studio.NET --K
  

MoonShadow uses Cinelerra for audio editing. Not that that helps you much ^^;

[Audacity] is probably overkill.  Which is probably a good thing.  --Vitenka  (VirtualDub? can do it, too.)

Audacity looks good, but I can't seem to get it to import .wma files, and I can't get MediaPlayer? to export as anything else... I'll try to find VirtualDub?, but any suggestions on getting Audacity working? --CH

Your problem is that you are using .wma  Stop doing that.  Hideous evil format of doom.  What is the actual source?  --Vitenka

Mostly CD's which I mostly don't have, although Chel probably does. Will Audacity rip from CD? VirtualDub? looks nice, but more geared to adding existing Audio to existing Video, and needing the latter to start with. --CH

There is only one application worth speaking about for ripping CD's.  [CDex].  Use it and love it.  --Vitenka