Ok, so I figured I would share and encourage the sharing of alternatives to oft bloated and costly software for (Usually) everyday use.
Feel free to contribute to the list, I'll add it to this post. Just be sure to denote what the software is, and it's homepage. Windows 98/2k/XP ONLY! (I don't know anyone still using 95, ME counts as 98 and Vista only stuff is of no use to most people yet)

Internet Browsers - Because Internet Explorer isn't

Mozilla Firefox
Opera
Lynx - Text Browser

Email Clients - Face it, Outlook Express has more holes than swiss cheese!

Mozilla Thunderbird
Anything else here people? Eudora is no longer developed, taken over by the Mozilla team.

FTP Clients - Because a standalone app does a better job

Filezilla
WinSCP
FireFTP (Firefox plugin, requires Mozilla Firefox)

Microsoft Office Alternatives (Can I say it any different? Didn't think so)

Open Office

Art Programs - Because Corel and PSP are great, but not FREE

GIMP
DrawPlus (I haven't used this, but it looks decent)
Picasa
IrfanView

3D Modeling/Animation - 3D Studio Max is THE best, bar none. But it's INSANELY EXPENSIVE!

Google SketchUp
Anim8or
Blender

you forgot
image manipulation-GIMP
http://www.gimp.org/

The FireFTP Firefox extension (FTP client) can be found here:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/684

You didn't mention Blender ( http://www.blender.org/ ) which goes under 3D modelling/animation it just behind 3DS Max, Blender was used to create a video called Elephants Dreams ( http://www.elephantsdream.org/ ) which I watched in HD myself.

As for the Internet Browser there also Safari ( http://www.apple.com/safari ) yes the new version does runs on Windows.

Added Blender, did not add Safari.

I knew of Safari already, but I did not add it because the Windows version is still a beta and has not had a stable release for Windows. Let me know when it does and I'll add it.

Irfanview - http://www.irfanview.com/
Picasa - http://picasa.google.com/

Lynx - http://lynx.isc.org/

Multi-Protocol Instant Messaging, Trillian is free & useless (to me it is,) and Trillian Pro is better but is not free.

The best alternative is Pidgin (GAIM) ( http://pidgin.im/ ) and it very stable of course.

You also forgot SUPER which is a program for converting video and audio files. http://www.erightsoft.com/SUPER.html

Paint.Net is an Awesome PS alternative and its super Small. Gimp is better, but still this is cool. http://www.getpaint.net/

For hard drive partitioning, there's gparted: http://gparted.sourceforge.net/

it can be used as regular software, a livecd, or liveusb

edit: replacement for Partition Magic

I love paint.net.

Also, another free and open source IM program is Miranda which is nice and lightweight.

Anti-Virus:
AntiVir
Avast
AVG
Windows Live Safety Center

Anti Spyware:
Ad-aware
Diet K
HijackThis
SpyBot Search & Destroy
SpywareBlaster
SpywareGuard
XCleaner

IRC:
BersIRC
Chatzilla
HydraIRC
kVIRC
MIRC
TinyIRC
XChat
Visual IRC

Anti-spam programs:
K9
MailWasher
POPFile
SpamBayes

CD/DVD burning:
Burn4Free
Burnatonce
CDBurnerXP
CDRDAO
CDR Tools Frontend
Deepburner
DVD Decrypter
Easy Burning, DropCD & Audio CD

Archiver
7-zip
bzip2
FilZip
IZArc
QuickZip
TUGZip
UltimateZip
UPX
Zip&Go
Zipgenius

Security / Encryption:
All-in-One Secretmaker
Axcrypt
Blowfish Advanced CS
Eraser
File Shredder
GnuPG
PGP Freeware
WindowsCleaner

Firewalls:
Kerio Personal Firewall
Sygate (FREE for personal use)
Zonealarm Basic firewall

Popup Blocker
Google Toolbar
NoAds
PopUp Stopper
Privoxy
Proxomitron

Web browsers:
Firefox
Flock
K-Meleon
Mozilla
Netscape

Media players:
Cygwin MPlayer
MaximusDVD
Media Player Classic
VideoLan


Picture editing:
ColorPic
Pixia
Sodiodi
The Gimp
Tuxpaint
DogWaffle 1.2

Mail:
i.Scribe
Mahogany Mail
Pegasus Mail
Thunderbird

Instant Messenger:
AIM
Gaim
Miranda IM
MSN Messenger
Pandion
Rhymbox
PSI
Spark IM
Trillian Basic
ICQ
Google Talk

FTP clients:
ACE FTP
Filezilla!
PuTTY
SmartFTP

IIRC, doesn't BS.Player's Free Version come with some sort of adware?

EDIT: Yes, yes it does.

the windows version of xchat isn't free either

well, there's a gtk version of xchat for windows that's free (but it sucks)

[edit]oh, and here's a grammar checker for the latest Open Office. Yes, the extension requires java. Now there shouldn't be a reason to use M$ office (unless you like macros).

As for Virtual Machine, I found something that is just as good as VMware and it free for personal use, It called Virtualbox which is based on qemu.

http://www.virtualbox.org/

I'm using CentOS as the guest OS and Windows Vista as host, so far so good it feels alot better than using VMware.

Foxit Viewer... Adobe's Viewer doesn't cost anything, but it is F*cking annoyingly huge and bloated.
http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/rd_intro.php

even better, Sumatra PDF viewer, it's almost non-existant

http://blog.kowalczyk.info/software/sumatrapdf/

3D:
Anim8or
Blender
gmax
Maya Personal Learning Ed.
Now3D
SOFTIMAGE|XSI EXP

Anti-Virus:
AntiVir
Avast
AVG
Windows Live Safety Center

Anti Spyware:
Ad-aware
Diet K
HijackThis
SpyBot Search & Destroy
SpywareBlaster
SpywareGuard
XCleaner

IRC:
BersIRC
Chatzilla
HydraIRC
kVIRC
MIRC
TinyIRC
XChat
Visual IRC

Anti-spam programs:
K9
MailWasher
POPFile
SpamBayes

Audio Player:
1by1
Foobar 2000
iTunes
Jet Audio Basic
Musik
QCD Player
Sonique
Winamp

Audio Tools:
Audacity
CDex
dBpowerAMP Music Converter
EAC
Encounter 2003
GermaniXEncoder
K-MP3
KraMixer
MP3 Book Helper
MP3 Tag
mp3DirectCut
MP3Gain
mp3Trim
MusicBrainz
Rarewares
SoundEngine Free
TagScanner
The GodFather

CD/DVD burning:
Burn4Free
Burnatonce[/URL]
CDBurnerXP
CDRDAO
CDR Tools Frontend
Deepburner
DVD Decrypter
Easy Burning, DropCD & Audio CD

Archiver
7-zip
bzip2
FilZip
IZArc
QuickZip
TUGZip
UltimateZip
UPX
Zip&Go
Zipgenius

Defrag:
DIRMS & Buzzsaw
OpenVMS

Desktop addons:
CursorXP
Google Desktop
MobyDock
tclock2

Download managers:
Fresh Download
LeechGet
Net Transport
Star Downloader
wackget
wget

Hosting:
X10
FreeWebz
SaveFile
RapidShare
FileFront
YouSendIt
XS
UploadImages
Putfile
PictureHost
PhotoBucket
ImageShack
Files

Security / Encryption:
All-in-One Secretmaker
Axcrypt
Blowfish Advanced CS
Eraser
File Shredder
GnuPG
PGP Freeware
WindowsCleaner

File managers:
2xExplorer
A43
Gyula's Navigator
JExplorer
MeeSoft Commander

Recovery:
PC Inspector File Recovery

Firewalls:
Kerio Personal Firewall
Outpost Firewall
Sygate (FREE for personal use)
Zonealarm Basic firewall

FTP clients:
ACE FTP
Filezilla!
PuTTY (SSH) - h
SmartFTP

FTP Servers:
FileZilla
GuildFTPD
Quick 'n Easy FTP Server
SlimFTPd
WarFTPD

HTML Editors:
1st page 2000
AceHTML
Aracnophilia
HTML-Kit
nVu
Selida
Trellian webPAGE
TSW WebCoder

Picture viewers:
Ahaview
Irfanview
SlowView
XNView
FastSTone

Instant Messenger:
AIM
Gaim
Miranda IM
MSN Messenger
Pandion
Rhymbox
PSI
Spark IM
Trillian Basic
ICQ
Google Talk

Internet Explorer shells:
Avantbrowser
Crazy Browser
Maxthon Browser (Formely MyIE2)
SlimBrowser

Mail:
i.Scribe
Mahogany Mail
Pegasus Mail
Thunderbird

Maintenance & Tools
CCleaner
EasyCleaner

Network Tools
http://www.softshape.com/download/
Ethereal Protocol Analyzer
NMap
Ntop
PingPlotter
RAS Graph & Stats
RealVNC
TightVNC
UltraVNC
WinSCP

Office:
602PC Suite free edition
AbiWord
Open Office

Partition:
Partition Resizer
Ranish Partition Manager
TestDisk

PDF Programs:
Free PDF
Ghostscript/GSView
PDF 995
PDFCreator
Open Office - /

PHP editors:
PHP designer 2006

Picture editing:
ColorPic
Pixia
Sodiodi
The Gimp
Tuxpaint

Programming:
ActivePerl
ConTEXT
Crimson Editor
Dev C++
Dev Pascal
Eclipse
Freepascal
jEdit
PHP Designer 2006
PHP Hypertext Parser
Python
Ruby
Ruby on Rails
SharpDevelop

Popup Blocker
Google Toolbar
NoAds
PopUp Stopper
Privoxy
Proxomitron

Sysinfo:
AIDA32
CPU-Z
Everest
Gkrellm
Motherboard monitor
WCPUID

Video codecs :
DivX Codec
FFDSHOW
Kazaa Lite Codec Pack
Nimo Codec Pack
Quicktime Alternative
Real Player Alternative

Video players:
BsPlayer
Cygwin MPlayer
MaximusDVD
Media Player Classic
VideoLan

Video tools:
DVD Shrink
DScaler
FlasKMPEG
GSpot
VirtualDub
VirtualDubMod
xviD
Zwei-Stein Video Editor

Voice/VOIP clients:
Teamspeak
Ventrilo
Skype

Web browsers:
Firefox
Flock
K-Meleon
Mozilla
Netscape

Web servers:
Abyss
Apache
Sambar
Savant
TinyWeb
ZWMS

Webcam programs:
booruWebCam
Pryme

Checksum Utilities:
fsum
hksfv
md5sum
md5summer

Misc:
AnalogX
AppRocket
Celestia
Cygwin
Dirkey
EditPad Lite
Inno Setup
Memtest-86
MWSnap
NetTime
Nullsoft Installer
Peerguardian
QuickSFV
png2ico
Stickies
Sysinternals
Vim

- Parted Magic: superior to GParted, and even more visually pleasing.
- XNview: widely superior to Irfanview in all aspects, and worth a recommendation over IV.
- PSPpad: advanced text editing for advanced users, and hex editor.
- Spyware Doctor Starter Edition: for realtime protection and cleanup. Available in the Google Pack. Version 6 seems to have used to be exclusively available from VNU.

Based on the screenshots I've seen, Parted Magic is just the gparted live cd with xfce

I'm not impressed

also, there's JkDefrag for defragmentation on windows.

Hey cinder havent talked to you in a long time, I hope you are doing well. Im glad to be back on the emulation scene havent talked to anyone other then barnito from dc in a long time. Anyways I just wanted to say hi and tell gamecop hey too.