There are thousands of programs out there for PC freeware and shareware, here are some of my favorites:

 

 

Graphics

Photo and Image Editing

- The Gimp 2 is free and really good, but a bit hard to learn.

 

 

Web Authoring

- JAlbum - for Web Gallery creation. Awesome program that is very customizable

 

3d Animation

- Maya PLE (free but stupid water marks)

- Blender

 

 

Video Production

- Smart Ripper for ripping from a DVD

- FlaskMpeg for encoding a riped file

 

 

Office Suites

- OpenOffice is free and works incredibly close to Microsoft Office

 

 

Computer Utilities

- Winzip for unzipping files

- Preview (Part of OSX) works just fine for reading pdf files

- Adobe Acrobat Reader for reading pdf files

 

 

Spyware & Security

- Spybot

 

 

Multimedia

- VLC for playing DVD's (Besides the native player that comes with it)

- DiVX 6.0 for movies

- MusicMatch for mp3 playing

- iTunes (Free to download) for mp3 playing.

 

 

Internet

- Firefox For web browsing (Safari is good as well)

- AOL (Just because it is the standard. But Do Not install the Wild Tangent stuff)