Ok I was just reading a favorite music list in the other forum (damn, I need to get something else to keep me busy), and I was wondering if there are any windows programs you people just can't live without? Right now other than games I'd have to say I use smartftp, winscp3, gaim, foobar 2000, 7-zip, and adaware pretty religiously. Anyone have something they couldn't see going a day without using? I haven't been keeping up on my new software lately, I just don't have the patience for crappy software these days.

Firefox - security
Winamp
McAfee 7.1 - free & for security
Spybot
AdAware
WS FTP Pro 9.0
FireWorks
Radmin

Well, when I must use windows...

K-Lite Codec Pack (the one with real and QT replacements), Firefox, Filezilla, Gimp, Nero (the windows cd burning program), Foobar2000 Special (all the plugins kick ass), Spybot Search & Destroy, Gaim, WinRAR (7-zip works too), a patched uxtheme.dll (so you aren't stuck with stupid windows themes) mIRC, Azureus, VirtualDubMod, DVDx (my fav. for ripping dvd's ==> divx), BSplayer, Danm Info Viewer, Open Office (if you stoop so low as to use a computer for mearly word processing), TightVNC

hmmm.... nice how most of that stuff is open source too...
With all that stuff, windows doesn't blow quite as bad, however, I just use linux when possible.

AIM, WinAmp 5, Azureus, Firefox, AnyDVD and/or DVD Decrypter + DVD2one (DVD piracy is great), Nero, Ad-Aware, Norton AV, Photoshop.

When I use Windows (which is only when my CS classes make me)
I use

Pear PC

firefox, trillian, winamp, thunderbird, shareaza are usually all that I run.

well, when i MUST use windows (which is 100% of the time i'm using a computer) i use

ZSNES
Winamp (2 for playing a single file, 3 for playlists)
Windows Media Player
Notepad (SO useful)
AIM with DeadAIM (because gaim is gay)
and i have both IE and Mozilla FireBird (not firefox, because upgrading is gay)
oh, and Nero 5.5 (not 6, becuase upgrading is gay)

nsrbb5 do you use Windows version 1.0 then (because you said upgrading is gay)?

Gota love hex2 by OC's Computer Consulting. For when you want to translate the comp sci techno jargon.
47-6F-74-20-48-45-58-3F

PuTTY and X-Win32 make me feel at home on most any Windows machine. However, since you're talking about programs that run native to the Windows desktop environment, I'll mention a few programs I'm rather fond of.

- The Windows 95 Shell. Windows 98 SE was the last release of any Win32 system I've run extensively on my machine. I hated the bloated shell and eye candy. I pulled the files from Windows 95 OSR 2.1 and applied them to my system. Appearance and performance increased dramatically.
- Winamp 2.50. Well, kinda. The actual executable is from version 2.50, but the mp3 decoder is from an earlier version (I believe 2.23) when the Nitrane engine was temporarily replaced by the Fraunhofer decoder. I personally think it sounds better. I've also got the wma plugin from it's introductury release since all the following releases had heftier digital restrictions management checks.
- Miranda IM. I used this as my instant messaging client. It's ultra fast, ultra tiny, has tons of plug-ins, a great community, and best of all, Free. Supports virtually every messaging protocol including ICQ, AIM, MSN, YahooIM, Jabber, Gadu-Gadu, IRC, WinPopUp, ...
- Opera 6.x. Very fast, very compact web browser supporting MDI windows, a wide variety of web standards, and compatible with Netscape/Mozilla-style plug-ins. I avoided upgrading to 7.x since it seemed to become more bloated and focused on eye-candy at that point.
- BulletProof FTP Client. Awesome FTP client with tons of options. Wipes the floor with WS FTP. Last version I'd used was 1.11, but 1.07 was my favorite. Stopped using it when I learned how to use a command-line client. *sigh*
- The Gordian Knot Codec Pack. Except for the installation of Gator via the DivX5 codec, it's never done me wrong. But I'm hardly a video post-production pro, so my opinion here doesn't count.
- WinZip 7.0. Gets the job done. After that release, it just seemed to get more bloated and annoying.
- Windows 9x "Toys" (PowerToys / KernelToys). Includes the famous TweakUI. Good fun for poking at system internals.
- Hex Workshop. I don't remember what version I used to use. Also good fun for poking at system internals. Extra bonus points awarded if you can turn it on itself to remove it's shareware limitation thingy.
- StarCraft. But I don't really miss it that much since it runs under Wine.
- Agent / FreeAgent. Nice Usenet programs. FA did just about everything I needed it to.
- Sam Spade. Network discovery and exploration tool. Adapts common low-level Internet queries (dig, whois, verbose traceroute) to a Windows-style interface.
- BladeEnc. Encoder for mp3s. Produces output more tonally pure than any other encoder at high bitrates. In my opinion, this is the best there is.
- TeleMate. Old DOS serial communications program which is better than anything I've seen since. I still used it up until I quit using Windows. SZModem was the best transfer protocol ever. TeleMate was almost topped in coolness by FXTerm (RoboBOARD GUI), except the cool interface didn't have near the features or the flexibility.
- Windows Notepad. Aww yeah.
- BackOrifice 2000. Remote administration tool. No, really, I actually used it that way. I had CAST256 and Serpent encryption going. It was fantastic. I never really got into VNC when it started becoming popular, though.
- Cisco VPN Client for Windows. I could never get the Microsoft IPSec "upgrade" to DUN 1.4 working. Cisco's client kicks ass and takes names, even behind a NAT firewall.

Seems like there was a bunch of other stuff, too. I'd have to fire up \\Fat-Tony (crotchety old Windows box) to get a complete listing of all my cool programs.

nope, SP1 though!

got printf?

I seem to run realsched.exe, like....all the time.

i'm surprised i haven't seen this yet, but for any kind of music editing or recording i use cool edit. also pro tools is pretty good for the same thing.

Winamp and Net Watcher Pro